Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset

by James Osiris Baldwin

  Good morning, Hector,

  I am writing to let you know that your body expired at 4:02 a.m. on Thursday, the 12th of September 2059, due to complications of the HEX retrovirus. The rest of your transition team and I offer you our condolences and support in light of this difficult news.

  We would like to encourage you to reach out to our [Support Channel] if you experience anxiety, depression, dissociation, or any other issues. Your remains are being treated as per your contract terms you signed with Ryuko, and will be stored in cryogenic containment as the world continues to search for a cure for HEX.

  We thank you for your service and for being willing to face this great mental and existential challenge.

  Temperance

  I rubbed my arm, where the Mark of Matir tingled under the leather glove I’d worn to bed. For several minutes, I sat there in stunned silence. “Your body expired.” Those three words sounded so inane, so… anti-climactic.

  “Hector?”

  I nearly jumped out of my skin. I whipped my head around, but it was only Kira. She was dressed in a long nightshirt, her hair a tousle of dark curls. When she saw my expression, her eyes widened.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, stepping closer.

  I shrugged, numb, and looked down at my hands. Flexed them. They felt solid, real, alive. If I blocked my ears, I’d hear my virtual heartbeat. It was an illusion, like the sleep - eight virtual hours condensed into a couple of minutes as an AI somewhere tracked me and adjusted my perception to match the game world. Dead. Fuck. That meant we were all gone. My entire family had been wiped out.

  “Hector? What’s wrong?”

  Her voice shook me out of my brief reverie. “It’s… I can’t explain.”

  “Did you have a bad dream?” She came to me and knelt down, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

  “No, nothing like that.” I took a deep, steadying breath. It didn’t help much. I was dead - the meat bicycle I’d ridden my whole life was gone. So what was I now? A copy of the real Hector Park? A ghost? “It’s… it’s a Starborn thing. I don’t know how to explain it without sounding really weird.”

  “Whatever it is, I’ll do my best to accept.” The girl’s eyes were a dark amber-brown in the sunlight, and earnest. “Unless it’s something really horrible, like… I don’t know… like you have a peculiar interest in barnyard animals or something.”

  That made me snort. “It’s like we live multiple lives. And I just died in one of them.”

  Kira frowned. “How strange. And you know for sure that… you died?”

  I nodded.

  “That must be terrible.”

  “Yeah. Not as bad as knowing everyone around me died, too.” I rubbed my eyes, then the back of my neck, staring at the cold ash in the fireplace. When I’d read that line about contacting psych support, I’d smirked a little. Me - Army tough guy, motorcyclist, bursting with machismo - talk to a shrink? But as I made myself get up for the day, intrusive thoughts kept pushing their way in. I wondered which one of the main symptoms had… well… killed me. While I’d been flying on Talenth with Rutha and Skyr Arnaud, had I, the real flesh and blood me, been choking to death on my own lungs? Did I have a stroke? Bleed out from the liver?

  “You know what helps me when I’m stressed?” Kira spoke up after a couple of minutes of silence. “Passionflower and catmint tea. Can I make some for you?”

  “Sure.” It couldn’t hurt. I now knew both those herbs were for treating anxiety. In game situations, they gave +3% bonus Combat XP and protected against the Fear debuff for thirty seconds. “I need to go and… uhh… attend to some morning needs before I drink any tea, though.”

  “You could just say you’re taking a piss. Dad uses the chamberpot outside,” Kira said, pushing herself up onto her bare feet.

  The prim, huffy tone of her voice cracked me up, and the black cloud lifted a little. “Thanks. Not just for the tea.”

  “Hmm? What? I didn’t do anything.” Kira already had her arms full of firewood, and looked back at me.

  “You did. You helped shake me out of a dark place.”

  “Of course I did. You saved my life, and besides that, it’s what we do here. The world is cruel, but we can always try to be decent people. That’s what my mother always said.” She turned back, stacking the timber into the hearth.

  I considered Kira for a moment, and all at once, her circumstances clicked. NPC or not, she’d lost someone important to her, too.

  “You don’t have to answer me… but did the war get her?” I asked, taking a seat beside my pack. While we talked, I reorganized my inventory.

  “Yes.” That was all she said.

  “I lost people to war, too,” I ventured. “Not here. Somewhere far away.”

  “I know.” Kira turned from the hearth with a mug of tea cupped in her hands.

  I took it with a small smile. “Educated guess?”

  “People who’ve been through grief have a look about them.” She prepared a cup for herself, and sat down across from me. “Work as a healer during wartime for long enough, and you learn to spot it.”

  “Smart and beautiful,” I said without thinking.

  Kira blushed, bringing her freckles out in sharp relief. “Don’t give me that. You’re about to leave. And you’ve got a woman’s scarf tied around that spear of yours. Where are you headed from here, anyway?”

  Now that I had the chance to sit and watch someone in broad daylight without interruption, there were things that told me Kira wasn’t a player. The way she handled her cup, for example. There was nuance in her speech and emotions, but the way she drank was identical each time.

  “North,” I said. “I want to join the Skyrdon and become a Dragon Knight.”

  The herbalist’s face froze.

  “I figure by the time I reach there, I… what?” I stopped mid-thought, and glanced up at her, puzzled. “What’s the matter? Did I say something?”

  She flushed and shook her head. “No. No, nothing. I just remembered something about what you said earlier. You were saying how you somehow live separate lives, and you know when you die in one of them. I often dream I’m someone else.”

  “Oh.” I eased down, but was still confused. “Well, I figured. You want to go adventuring, right?”

  “That’s not what I mean.” The woman’s brow creased. “I mean, like… I dream of being somewhere else, as someone else. In those dreams, I’m dying in a place with people moaning all around me, or I’m locked in a room full of light, or running through the ruins of huge buildings. Sometimes I’m fighting. But when I wake up, I can’t remember what I was fighting for. Dad says its nothing to worry about… he says everyone has dreams like that.”

  I finished off the last of my tea and stood up, shrugging into my pack. “Well, I guess. Everyone has bad dreams sometimes.”

  “No. He means that we all have dreams like mine.” Kira’s eyes were wide and guileless. “Everyone we know. War is a terrible thing, Dragozin Hector. It’s ruined this land, and… when you head north to seek out the dragon knights…”

  I frowned, confused. “What?”

  She looked up at me. “Please remember why you helped us. And please, please don’t mention what you overheard in the inn.”

  Part Two: Long Live the Queen

  Chapter 23

  Two days’ ride out from Lyrensgrove, and the blasted farmland and crumbling battlefields gave way to dark, dense forest. Cutthroat and I always rode up, and the hills grew higher and wilder the further north we went. The road began to climb, and soon the wasted plains of Ilia were laid bare to my right, rolling off into the horizon. By the fifth day, the view had turned into mountains: black giants crouched in regal, frigid cloaks of snow and fir. The plains vanished, plunging us into primeval wood.

  The road to Fort Palewing was deeply rutted, but lonely. The few people who made this trip, taking supplies to the Skyrdon, had no use for inns. We slept in rude waystops that were little more than caves dug into an
cient ruins. Many of them were dug into enormous half-circles of stone and broken columns that jutted out everywhere on the ground. There was enough room in these shelters for me, Cutthroat, and a small fire. The hookwing was uncommonly calm inside these ruins, displaying none of her usual savagery. Like a cat, she preferred to sleep in a loaf shape – her hook-claws tucked against her chest, feet pulled up underneath her, tail stretched out. While I repaired my armor with a thick bone awl and catgut, she kept watch, growling every time the wind whipped the branches of nearby trees against the standing stones.

  Level-wise, I was still running behind where I wanted to be. The EXP penalty turned combat into an incremental grind. I’d fought ghouls, crows, coyote-like creatures, and yes – bunnies. But these woods were not for characters of my level. The wolves howling outside were Level 8, and I’d glimpsed other, larger shadows in the forest with red skull icons flashing warningly in the upper right-hand corner of my HUD overlay. Skills levelled faster than overall level, which was nice – but the insight required to learn new things was out of reach until I could push to Level 5.

  We arrived at the fortress gates on the evening of the eighth day. The land outside Fort Palewing had been cleared so that guards could watch anyone - or anything - coming up on them from the forest or the road toward the ancient cliffside that marked the entry to the dragon knights’ stronghold. A hundred feet away at the top of a sharply steepening hill was a high stone wall. Three guards waited at the barred gate. They were grizzled, dark men with frost in their beards and spears and axes in their hands. They watched me curiously as I dismounted and led my tired, muzzled mount toward them.

  "Who goes there?" The closest one called.

  "An aspirant. Hector Dragozin," I replied, when I was close enough to be heard over the wind. It was howling today, driving gusts of snow off into the air from trees and hillsides. "I've come to try out for the Skyrdon."

  "Someone refer you for the trials?" The same guard jerked his chin at me as he spoke.

  I pulled the Writ out of my Inventory, and it materialized in my hand. No one so much as blinked an eye. "I have a Writ of Good Standing from Lady Rutha, Court Sorceress of Ilia."

  "I'll get a squire to take it to the Novice Master. Go find a place to camp. It'll take a while." The guard nodded curtly and went to thump on the gate. One of the huge black oak doors swung open smoothly, allowing him to slip inside.

  I took him at his word and built a small fire. It was down to hot coals by the time the guard returned with a young boy who couldn't have been older than twelve. The kid strode toward me, his cloak hood drawn up, a crossbow in one hand, Rutha’s letter in the other.

  "Welcome," the boy said. He was dark-eyed and serious as he handed the Writ back to me. The wax had been broken. "The Novice Master is drilling the current batch of recruits in the Old Hall. He says to come with all speed."

  "Is there a stable for my hookwing?" I asked. "She's kind of a special needs animal."

  The squire seemed to notice the muzzle for the first time, but didn't look especially taken aback. "Of course. Come this way, missiure. We must hurry."

  I couldn't believe it had been this easy. Head ringing, I followed the boy at a quick walk into Fort Palewing, glancing at every shadow in case the knight commander jumped out to lecture me on why my filthy barbarian self wasn't allowed here. We stopped to hand Cutthroat over to the stable hands at the central stable, and then the squire led me through a maze of buildings and up a flight of stairs. At the top, I was able to get a look out a window - and drew a sharp breath at the sight on the horizon. A dark tower lanced up into the sky like a spear, framed against the huge yellow surface of the moon at the other end of a dense forest. I could see the way the cliffs curved around like a bowl from here. We weren't in a valley - the Fort, the gate, everything was built into the rim of an enormous dormant volcano, a caldera larger than most cities.

  I was taken to a section of the fortress that was mounted in the cliff. We went into what looked like an old church, a room with a dome ceiling and scaffolding holding a crumbling wall together. At the far end, a row of nine young men and women faced a tall, impressive-looking older man in the silver and blue armor of the Skyrdon. He had a short, well-groomed beard, steel gray hair and – once I got close enough to see - intense, intelligent gray eyes. Like Arnaud, his irises and pupils were unnaturally large.

  “Another aspiring Bondee? Just in time,” he boomed over the heads of the other would-be postulants, who turned to look at me. “Join us, young... hmm.”

  I did join them, stopping a short distance away when I noticed the awkward silence. Oh, right. Barbarian. I was the only Tuun in the room. There were four other PCs – I could tell by the fine silvery rings hanging behind their heads in the AR interface - but both they and the NPCs all had the luxurious clothes and bearing of young Ilian nobility. By contrast, I looked like some kind of road-weary Mongolian pirate.

  "I brought the Writ?" I held it up hopefully, like a shield.

  "I've seen it. No need to see it again, Starborn." The man motioned to the curious recruits, then folded his hands behind his back. "I am Skyr Tymos, the Novice Master and Castellan of Fort Palewing. Fall in."

  I took my place at the end of the line, ignoring the obvious stares from the others.

  “It is time you learned what you’re all getting yourselves into,” the Novice Master said. His reedy voice carried well in the chamber where he’d assembled us. “Now, as I was saying. For three millennia, the Skyrdon of Saint Grigori have played a vital role in the defense of Ilia and the continuation of the seven kingdoms of Hercynia. To become a Skyr means undergoing the same Trials undergone by Saint Grigori himself. They will very likely kill you – the Trial is dangerous, the training is difficult, and you will be tested to the very limits of your body before you ever set a foot on the hatching grounds. I will not even learn your names until the last of you are left standing. Your name will be ‘Aspirant’ or ‘Postulant’ – nothing more.”

  He let that sink in for a second before resuming his speech.

  “Alright… we have five Starborn here with us today.” The old knight nodded to each of us in turn. “You lot may immediately note that you cannot assign Fort Palewing as your Reincarnation Point. Now that you have arrived, this is your only chance to secure the right to stand before the altar of Saint Grigori and join your soul to that of a dragon. There are no second chances. You may perish from weakness, in which case you are not fit to become a squire, or bad luck, in which case you should feel blessed to have your feet on the ground and not in the sky. There is no such thing as an unlucky dragonman. Am I understood?”

  “Sir yes sir!” One of the other PCs and I both burst out at the top of our lungs at the same time out of habit, voices bouncing off the high domed chamber. We looked at each other with a moment of delighted recognition, while the non-military members in our ranks murmured their agreement.

  Skyr Tymos chuckled. “Such enthusiasm. Until you have proven yourselves worthy, you are not even truly a postulant. You are nothing but a guest here. To become a postulant and take the Trial of Marantha, you must perform a deed worthy of a knight under the supervision of a trusted witness, who will report back to me, the Novice Master, of your prowess in battle. After that - assuming you survive - you will gain the right to Trial.

  An alert popped up in my vision:

  New Quest: Prove Your Mettle

  To be accepted by the Skyrdon of St. Grigori, you must prove yourself capable of holding your own in honorable combat against the Stranged monsters and bandits menacing Camp Prichard, a small prison camp under the jurisdiction of Fort Palewing.

  WARNING: This quest will fail if you use dirty tactics such as sneaking, ambushing, backstabbing unwary opponents, pickpocketing, etc.

  WARNING: If you die, you will respawn in the closest town and will not be able to take this quest again.

  Difficulty: Very High

  Reward: Experience and right to take the Trial of Sa
int Grigori.

  A prison camp? Ugh. Even so, I accepted the quest without hesitation. Had to be in it to win it.

  “Good,” Skyr Tymos said as we all confirmed. “There’s ten of you here, plus another twenty-two aspirants in the barracks. Thirty-two of you, and only three eggs in the Matriarch’s last clutch.”

  Only three!? My heart sank and leapt at the same time.

  “By the time the Trial is over, we normally end up with as many postulants as eggs,” Tymos said. “It is a sobering thought to bear in mind. For now, however, you’ll be assigned to Camp Prichard and working in teams to rid the area of threats. If you have not already begun the Path of the Knight, then you will need to start it as soon as possible. You cannot become a Dragon Knight without being a Knight first. Any questions?”

  I was about to put my hand up to ask about the Knight path requirement, but wasn’t fast enough. Skyr Tymos nodded to a sallow, sandy-haired man with strange red eyes. He was one of the PCs.

  “What can we expect at the camp?” The player asked.

  “Camp Prichard is a work camp for Royalist rebels. The village also still has some of the old inhabitants, who are freedmen. They run the place, while the prisoners are involved in cleanup and excavation activities, scavenging weapons and relics and the like,” Skyr Tymos replied, studying the man down the bridge of his long nose. “That means the camp is attractive to bandits and other swine. They waylay caravans along the roads leading to and from Liren. You may be dealing with those bandits, or you may be sent to hunt one of the magic-tainted beasts that are known to prey on unwary villagers. We keep the population down, but there’s always some new Stranged beast out there causing havoc.”

  “I see. And when will we be going?”

  “Tonight, and then we start patrols at dawn.”

  “That’s all, then. Thank you, Skyr,” the aspirant said.

  The other ex-soldier - a tall, handsome man with alabaster skin and a short, stiff crewcut of feathery white hair - was the next to raise his hand. “Do we have information on the operational capacity of these bandits? Are we talking about organized outlaw knights with mounts and decent arms, or poorly equipped rogue peasants bringing people to bay with farm tools? What about level?”