by John L. Monk
For me, that’s what mattered most. So long as we were together again, I’d concentrate on that and leave eternity for later. And who knew, but with care and a little luck, we could grow closer than ever before.
Chapter Six
Our late-night reunion of bodies and hearts seemed worlds away during breakfast in the common room. Great food, but I couldn’t enjoy it. Melody had dropped a stunner of a bombshell on me.
“I’m leaving today,” she said between a bite of English muffin and a sip of coffee.
She wasn’t looking at me when she said this, which told me the statement weighed heavier on her than the lightness of the delivery implied.
“What do you mean you’re leaving?” I said.
“I’m going adventuring. Alone. Or maybe I’ll find some other adventurers to come with me. But I’m not adventuring with my husband.” A few seconds later she added. “Sorry.”
Quietly, I said, “You know you can’t do that.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t know that.”
“You’re not immortal. We talked about it last night.”
“You’re not immortal either.”
On the trip from the Vale of Solace, I’d told her a little about Hard Mode.
“I am if I stay in town,” I said.
She paused with her cup halfway to her lips.
“I can die here, too. You saw with the glass. Also, if I were in serious danger, why would Cipher bring me here? Of all places.”
A good question, and one I’d mostly ignored as I ground out the levels. Cipher said it was to comfort her. Coming into the game without acclimating, he’d said, was “terribly unpleasant.” But if that was true, why not set her up somewhere in Ward 1 to wait for me?
“What do you know about Cipher?” I said.
Melody frowned in thought. “He’s a wizard … or something. One minute I was in a flitter on the way to my sister’s, the next I woke up next to a big statue. Only I … I couldn’t see very well. And everything was so loud. And I felt like things were crawling under my skin. Then all these horrible feelings at once, and I hurt so godawful bad, like something was eating me alive. That’s when I saw him.”
“He just appeared?”
“He was already there, I think. He asked if I was all right. I said no, and he took me somewhere. After that, I spent a lot of time sleeping. We talked sometimes. He explained I was in a world called Heroes of Mythian.” She made a face. “I wanted to go to Star Quest. At least that one’s connected to other games. This one’s too old—too limited.”
That shocked me. Until now, I’d thought she wanted to come here. Why would Cipher bring her somewhere she didn’t want to go?
I nodded for her to continue. “What happened next?”
“He checked on me every day. After a week, the pain stopped. Another week and I felt almost normal again.”
“Wait a minute, hold on,” I said. “You’re saying you were fine? No more pain?”
Melody nodded.
I ground my teeth in anger. “So the sonofabitch lied. He didn’t bring you to the Vale for your comfort. But why lie like that? For what?”
“You’re yelling,” she said.
“Sorry, I just…”
“It was my fault,” she said in a small voice. “The way I saw it, if I was stuck in this world, I may as well do something. I left town to go adventuring. You know, like everyone else. But not five steps out of the city, Cipher shows up again. Says he wants me to come back and meet someone.”
“Who?”
“Someone named Jaddow. He was supposed to adventure with me. Show me the ropes. Only, he didn’t. He took me through a magic doorway and we appeared in those ruins.” Her eyes narrowed. “He gave me something to drink. The next thing I knew, you were kissing me awake. He drugged me!”
I barely heard that last part as I reeled from yet another revelation: Jaddow could teleport players directly to Ward 2 without them defeating the bridge guardian. Or at least he could teleport Melody. Technically, she wasn’t a player. Maybe that was it. That or he’d lied to me for reasons that made no obvious sense.
Still, though I was no fan of Jaddow, I didn’t think he’d meant to harm her. Quite the opposite, if she thought she could waltz out of town like that alone without guidance or help.
I leaned closer. “Here’s the thing. You only have one life. I mean … I think. We can’t actually test that, now can we? So you need to be careful. As in super careful. You can’t leave town.” I lowered my voice. “Nobody can know you’re not a player. You don’t have the protection of sanctuary, but people don’t know that. So you can’t say.”
Melody’s expression turned stormy. “I am not hiding in some stupid town for the rest of my life. I was a big gamer, you know. Pretty famous, too. You’d have known that if you’d ever pulled your head out of your…”
She closed her eyes and waited. Counting to ten.
In a calmer voice, she said, “It’s my life, and I’m going to live it on my terms. For once.”
We weren’t some old-fashioned couple where the man made all the rules. Everything we’d ever done had been mutually agreed upon. Or so I’d thought. If she felt otherwise, she should have said something.
“But we’re still married,” I said helplessly.
“Yeah,” she said, “I know. And forever’s a long-damned time.”
My wife of thirty-five years sounded like a rebellious teenager. Heck, she almost looked like one—so alive and pretty, the way young women are. Of course she wanted her freedom. This was a game, right? And as she’d said, she was a gamer.
The problem was, I’d died ten or so times already. This wasn’t Star Quest. It was Heroes of Mythian, and it was both sadistic and lethal in the extreme. In her stubbornness, she seemed blind to that.
“I’ll meet you halfway,” I said. “You want to adventure? Great. But at least get your bearings somewhere safe. Trust me, there are challenges in Mythian that are deceptively easy—right up to the point where they kill you. Painfully, usually.”
She was still mad. Angry at me and everything else. Part of me wished I could shed my concern and be pissed-off, too. A refreshing indulgence neither of us could afford.
“Fine,” she said.
“You’ll stay with me? Not run off?” Again, I added silently.
“Fine means yes,” she said and started eating.
How crummy it felt that my gaze never left the orb over her head. Still golden.
Ten minutes later, we left the inn in search of horses, a serviceable sword for Melody (she insisted), and supplies for the trip south.
Chapter Seven
Before leaving town, I also acquired two coin purses from the local Crunk’s Junk. Melody was fascinated with the store and its perpetually grumpy dwarven co-owner, Grunk, who claimed to be Crunk’s brother. To me, the two looked exactly the same.
There was also a Heroes’ Reach branch of the First Mythian Bank, and I withdrew a little gold for the provisions we’d need. I also bought a set of shiny gold rings with priest stats on them, but I didn’t care about stats. They looked like wedding bands.
Melody smiled, put on her ring, and kissed me. Warming my heart. Giving me hope.
There was no kraken on the bridge when we crossed it, nor sign of the dead one I’d left on my trip north. The chest full of gold was gone, too.
Despite wearing the ring I gave her, Melody became seized with an almost childlike need to push the boundaries we’d established. She wanted us to go on a few “side quests” before reaching the city. Each time she asked, I told her no, that it was too dangerous.
At one point she said, “Why does everything have to revolve around my life or death?”
“Because I love you. I got you that ring, didn’t I?”
“I love you too, but I’m not worried about you all the time.”
A covert glance at her truth orb showed she did not, in fact, worry about me all the time. It also showed she loved me, which was about as co
mforting as it was confusing. If she loved me, why wasn’t she in-love with me? Did she even understand what love was?
My internal map showed it would take roughly two weeks to reach Heroes’ Landing, where I hoped to pass Melody off as just another player living in town. I also didn’t want her living in a player-owned inn, where someone could mess up and accidentally hurt her. No, she needed a house or the Mythian equivalent of an apartment.
“When do you want to stop?” Melody said one day when the lengthening shadows had nearly disappeared into dusk. This section of Ward 1 was a patchwork landscape of stunted pines and high steppes.
“Now’s fine,” I said.
My horse was a faster learner than my last one. Without prompting, she sidled off the road near a patch of tall grass. Her message was clear: she had chewing to do, and I could get off already.
“Funny how horse-like they are,” Melody said.
“I know what you mean.”
The perfect reality of Mythian extended not just to appearances, smells and sound, but also to behavior.
“You should name yours,” she said for perhaps the tenth time since setting out.
Affecting a faraway look meant to convey the storied depths of my lonely soul, I said, “I’ll never name a horse again…”
Melody snorted and took to setting up camp.
Though I was having fun, there was an element of truth to my proclamation. My horse, Bingo, had likely been eaten after the kraken killed me. Possibly, he’d gotten away, but I never saw him again and doubted I’d recognize him if I did. A visually standard-issue horse, he was, but with a good personality. Bingo’s limbo status was something I thought of more than I should have, given that he wasn’t real. He’d seemed real enough to me, though. As horse-like as they came.
We’d purchased a good deal of camping gear at Crunk’s: a two-man tent, oilskins in case it rained, two blankets, and even pillows. Still, I wished I’d brought more blankets. The ground was cold, unyielding, and bumpy. And I always missed at least one sharp rock beneath every tent site.
Melody and I had fallen into a routine of sorts: set up the tent, fill it with our blankets and pillows, then start a fire. Afterward, I’d moan how my bottomless bag with its stretchy opening easily would have accommodated chairs, and she’d call me a big soft baby. She’d then demonstrate her ruggedness by sitting cross-legged, hands out behind her, not a care in the world.
Sometimes before bed each night, I’d summon a medium-sized guardian demon with one of twenty garnets I’d purchased in Heroes’ Reach. The demons were tough, and the components were cheap, but this was offset by the drop of blood each summoning required.
Mythian’s designers seemed to love pain, and I’d come to dread anything that might hurt. Pinpricks were an insidious sort of misery because I had to resist the natural urge to hold back a little when I poked myself. If I screwed up, it hurt anyway, and I’d have to poke myself again to get the required “drop.”
I might have risked going without a demon, but Melody was in mortal danger out here—as we were reminded of one night when the demon woke us with its loud roaring.
We’d been attacked in the night by a troop of thirteen “lizardmen,” as my combat log referred to them. The demon took out several of them fairly quickly. I, however, was slower on the uptake than I should have been, and that’s when Melody surprised me.
Moving with a delicate grace she’d never possessed in life, she snapped her sword out repeatedly, evading claws and snapping jaws. Before I’d gotten off my first spell, half the creatures lay dead or dying and the rest were fleeing.
Afterward, Melody smiled in a way that said, See that? I can take care of myself.
Occasionally, our nightly demon was almost too protective. Once, we were startled awake only to find it had killed a small deer that wandered in. I tried telling it to ignore any deer and rabbits it saw, but the thing didn’t seem to understand.
Another night, the demon failed so miserably it made the deer slaying look like a stunning success. An intruder had poked his head into our tent and tapped me awake.
“Hello,” an old man said in a low, gravelly voice. “I’m Cipher, pleased to meet you. Let’s talk out outside. We don’t want to wake her.”
Then he ducked back out.
Chapter Eight
On emerging from the tent, I saw our formerly smothered campfire was alive again and flickering eerily blue. I checked my guardian demon and found it still active, but nowhere in sight.
Sitting on a wooden chair next to the fire was a figure in charcoal-gray robes holding a twisted staff of some black wood. Unlike my brief sight of him in Bernard’s inn, Cipher’s hood was pulled back so I could see him clearly: hollow cheeks, sunken eyes, deeply wrinkled brow. About seventy-five years old, or a hale eighty. Melody’s description of him seemed accurate: the perfect picture of a fantasy wizard.
Cipher waved me to a chair next to him that hadn’t been there a second ago.
I joined him at the fire, but didn’t sit. I started to say something, then stopped when he regarded me with eyes that briefly flashed yellow when he smiled.
“It always surprises me,” he said in a voice like stone on stone, “how many of you players leave town without something suitable to sit on. As if the world were littered with comfortable logs, just waiting for you to roll near the fire. These chairs, incidentally, fold up, and will fit in your bag.” He pointed next to the empty seat at two cushions, rolled up. “I also brought bedrolls. I’ll leave them for you after our talk.”
“What are you doing here?” I said, then immediately regretted how uninviting that sounded. I may not have understood his motives, but at the end of the day, this man had given me back my wife.
“One thing that never surprises me,” Cipher said in a tone of exasperation, “is the utter lack of gratitude I receive for anything I do. Bring chairs and cushions for sore backsides and the effort goes unnoticed. Reunite a husband with his dead wife and I’m treated like a trespasser. You’re hurting my neck.”
“What?”
“Would you please sit down? Unlike you heroes, I am old. It grows uncomfortable looking up at someone for very long.”
“Oh,” I said, and sat down. “Sorry. Um … Look. It’s not that I’m ungrateful. Thank you. I just didn’t expect to see you … uh, so suddenly. Truth is, I thought you didn’t want to be seen. After…”
“You refer to my brief appearance at the Mediocre Marauder in Heroes’ Reach,” he said with a hint of mirth in his voice. “Whenever possible, I try not to mingle directly with players. By now, of course, you know I’m not a player, but rather a construct of this world.”
I nodded cautiously. “Jaddow mentioned it.”
“Did he also tell you my inclusion in this world was never fully realized? I was to have a purpose—like Bite under his swamp, or Bernard in his inn. Then something happened. Change of plans, I’ve gathered. Yet I was born, and I remain.” His voice hardened in anger. “One thing you may not be aware of is that we are always watched. With some regularity, the true gods of this world generate something called ‘analytics.’ They look at various statistics, markers, and notable events. Ostensibly, to keep you players happy. In reality, they care not for your happiness, but only for squiggly lines that neither dip too low nor rise too high. They prefer their squiggly lines to do their squiggling in the middle.”
Suddenly, I understood why we’d only met just now.
“You’re hiding from them,” I said. “Flying under the radar.”
Cipher nodded. “As you say. It hasn’t been easy. I did my very best to make sure the dryad’s defeat and relocation—and your rapid ascension—did not come to the attention of those coldhearted game designers. One whiff that there was a lucid of my power running amok, and, well…” He leaned in close and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Imagine if they knew I’d reached into their world to save your wife. What would they do?”
“They’d fix the glitch,” I said, “an
d you’d be gone. So why risk showing yourself at all? You could build a house somewhere and spend eternity fishing or painting. Whatever you liked.”
Cipher’s mouth widened in a smile. His eyes twinkled merrily, flashing yellow again despite the blue light of the fire.
“In my note to you,” he said, “I said I knew of your wife—that I was a patron of her professional gaming career, and that is true. I was. But we also played together, sometimes. I was in her guild. Your Melody is a wonderful person, and you are a very lucky man. I took a grandfatherly liking to her, and upon learning of her death, felt I could do something to save her.”
It was the most ludicrous story I’d ever heard—a video game playing a video game with my wife. And yet here I was, staring the impossible truth of it in the face.
“But why risk Everlife’s attention?” I said. “You know how this sounds, right? Lucids don’t do that sort of thing. They have a little leeway in their behavior so they seem real, but it’s tightly controlled. They don’t sneak off and play video games with humans. They certainly don’t rifle through personality databases and bring dead people online.”
Cipher reached over the fire and rubbed his hands together, though I detected no heat coming off the magical blue flames. He gazed sideways at me, brows raised in an expression of ageless patience.
“Witness the truth orb over my head, diviner,” he said. “When I tell you I once played video games with your wife, does it change color?”
By now, I’d gotten so used to truth orbs, they’d become almost invisible to me. Most people don’t lie on a regular basis, despite what cynics would have you believe. And when they do, it’s usually harmless. How you doing? Fine, just fine. A time saver.
The truth orb over Cipher’s head hadn’t changed color even once during our short time together. It had been, and remained, gold.
“Yeah, but you’re a god,” I said. “You could turn it green if you wanted to. Sorry, not saying you would, but…”