So there I was.
Hanging off the side of a tree—no, THE tree—in a half-frozen, half-delirious state, staring at a door.
A door.
Not some grand, golden archway or a gate carved by ancient, mystical elves. Nope. Just a plain wooden door nestled in the bark like someone decided to build their weird little treehouse at the edge of existence.
I blinked a few times, making sure I wasn't hallucinating. (I mean, I was hungry, tired, and my hands felt like icicles, so hallucination was still on the table.)
"This… this is not how quests work," I muttered, clinging to the bark for dear life. "You don't just climb a death-defying tree, nearly fall fifty times, and then find a door. Where's the magical staircase? The glowing waypoint? The quest giver telling me to 'seek the path' in riddles?"
I turned to glare at the giant owl perched nearby, who had, to my immense jealousy, flown up here. The smug bird tilted its head, looking very proud of itself.
"Yeah, yeah. I'm climbing. I'm clearly climbing, okay? Now what do I do with this door? Knock?"
The owl didn't answer. (Shock of the century, I know.) It just blinked its massive eyes and let out a low rumbling hoot that I swear sounded like, "Figure it out."
With a sigh, I reached for the handle. My fingers were shaking—from the cold, exhaustion, or sheer nerves, I couldn't tell.
What's behind this door?
A dungeon boss? A cozy fireplace? My mom yelling at me for not taking out the trash? At this point, it could be anything.
"Please don't be monsters," I whispered to myself. "Or worse, math problems."
I turned the handle and pushed.
What I saw on the other side nearly made me step back and close the door again.
The owl—yeah, that owl—was gone.
In its place stood… a woman.
And not just any woman. Imagine someone had taken all the grace of an ice queen, mixed it with the sharp beauty of an elf from a big-budget fantasy movie, and then hit the slider to max on the "albino" setting. Her skin was pale as snow, her hair cascaded in white waves that shimmered like silk, and her piercing golden eyes—oh, those owl-like eyes—locked onto me with unsettling familiarity. She stood tall, draped in robes that were somehow both simple and regal, trimmed in silver.
"Oh, great," I muttered, blinking hard. "The owl can turn into an NPC now. That's not terrifying."
She tilted her head, the motion identical to the owl's.
"You are far from your world," she said, her voice smooth and cold, like winter air whispering through frozen trees.
"Yeah, no kidding," I shot back. "Also, can we talk about the whole transformation thing? That's not normal. Where I'm from, owls don't turn into… well, you. Unless this is some kind of reverse query execution where my input got turned into output I really wasn't ready for."
She blinked. "I do not understand."
Of course she didn't. Explaining tech analogies to magical beings was like debugging spaghetti code. Still, my brain couldn't help it—FAANG developer instincts die hard.
"Look," I began, pacing and flailing my arms, "if this is the World Tree, and you're connected to it somehow—let's call you the system admin—then me showing up here is the equivalent of injecting a bad query into your database. I don't belong here, and this path shouldn't even exist. Somewhere, something's gone horribly wrong."
She watched me silently, her head still tilted.
"Also, bonus points for throwing me into a runtime error without any documentation," I muttered, glancing up at the ceiling. "What happened to a simple onboarding process? A quest log? Anything?"
"You are unlike the others who have come before," she said, interrupting my monologue. "You speak strangely."
"It's called desperation, lady. It's all I've got left."
She stepped closer, gliding across the floor so effortlessly I half-expected her to hover.
"You wish to return home," she stated more than asked.
"Yes, please. Do you have a portal, a fast-travel option, or a 'fix my life' button somewhere? I'll take anything."
"The way back will not be given. It must be earned."
Of course it must. I pinched the bridge of my nose.
"Why is everything here set up like a bad mobile game?"
Her golden eyes narrowed. "The Tree chooses who may leave. And who must stay."
"Okay, let me guess: I'm stuck here unless I follow the golden path of destiny or something?"
She smiled faintly—the kind of smile that said, Exactly.
Great. Just great.
"Fine," I muttered, throwing my hands up. "Lead the way, magical owl-woman. But if this ends up being a fetch quest, I'm uninstalling."
She said nothing, only turned and gestured to the dark path through the roots—a path that pulsed faintly with light, leading further into the unknown.
As I followed, I couldn't help but mumble to myself.
Note to self: Never trust owls. They're probably always attractive people with cryptic agendas.
And so I walked, feeling like I was caught in an infinite loop of bad queries and vague system responses. Somewhere in the back of my head, I swore I heard the universe laughing.