by Vic Connor
But as he casts it, he knows how futile the gesture is. The man barely reacts to his spell; he holds up a hand, catching the projectile in his palm without wincing, without flinching, and it evaporates before it can cause any damage.
“Enough of that, boy,” the man scolds. He waves the same hand in a lazy, almost bored gesture, and the Staff of Adamant flies from Aremos’ grasp. It arcs away, shooting high in the air before falling, clattering over to the other side of the charnel house. “Sit, please,” the man says, gesturing once more. Another, smaller wind whips up, gathering the dust and bones behind Aremos and forming a gruesome chair. The man points to it and Aremos himself flies backward, landing in the seat. He hits it hard, and it hurts.
He tries to jump up but finds that he can’t. His limbs won’t move, his muscles have gone rigid and seem frozen in place.
“You will sit with me for a little while,” the man commands, walking toward Aremos. Another chair forms in the same manner and the man sits down a few feet away. He interlaces his fingers, rests his chin on them and leans forward, regarding his catch.
Close up, Aremos can better make out the man’s features. He’s bald but not old, skinny but not weak, and his eyes glow with a yellow light which does nothing so much as underline their own intensity. He smiles, but Aremos has no doubt that this man could destroy him with a thought. He wears the same black robes that Aremos has seen on the other residents of this town, yet he exudes a quiet, subtle power that identifies him as different from anyone or anything else.
“Do you know where you are, Aremos?” the man asks.
There’s no menace to his voice, Aremos observes. He sounds friendly, warm even: The juxtaposition with everything else Aremos has experienced so far unnerves him more than anything.
“I am in Arkhart,” Aremos replies, though he knows he might be incorrect. “An unknown realm outside of the main seven, perhaps?”
The man chuckles. “Perhaps,” he agrees.
“Who are you?” Aremos asks. “What are you?”
“I’m a dreadnought,” the man explains. “One of only a very few. And this,” he adds, gesturing to the outside. “This is the realm of Sanguis, a nightmare of our own creation, entirely fashioned for our … amusement. We dreadnoughts are to Sanguis what your Makers are to Arkhart. And that is all you need to know for the moment.”
The wind whistles through the charnel house once more, raising dust and shadows. The shadows congeal into seven shapes; the shades from outside have come to watch, standing in a circle around them. “If you want to leave this realm, if you want to flourish, you will need to play our quests,” the shades whisper, laughing again in their rasping voices.
“What quests?” Aremos asks.
The dreadnought holds out a hand and a skull leaps into it from the floor. He turns it to face Aremos, whispering some words in an unfamiliar tongue. The skull’s eyes begin to glow a pale yellow, then the light grows outward, engulfing the whole skull. While the shades continue laughing, the light shapes itself around the skull. It clings to the skull and molds itself into the likeness of a girl’s face. For a brief second, the light glows brighter, then dies so that the dreadnought is holding the real, fleshy head of a young girl.
“Do you recognize her, Aremos?” the dreadnought asks.
“Meredith,” Aremos nods. “The sorcerer’s daughter. You sent the demon to abduct her?”
The shades laugh louder than ever. Even the dreadnought laughs. “Oh no, no, no, no… Not our style, Aremos,” he replies. “No, that was not us. A demon invaded Arkhart from the demonic plane, entirely separate from Sanguis. The Makers allowed it to happen so fools like you would be entertained.”
“So you don’t have her?”
“Well…” The dreadnought smiles. “Her body is with the demon, at the end of your quest in Arkhart. You will need to return, day by day, to finish the missions and track her down. You still need to rescue her … well, her body at least,” the dreadnought tells him. “We snuck into that quest … just your branch of it, of course. Anybody else taking part in it will come across business as usual. But for you—we stole her soul, her mind, her self. Without her soul, her body is useless, and without her body, well…” He holds out his hand and the head evaporates, leaving no trace.
“You need to fight two quests simultaneously, if you want to save dear Meredith,” the dreadnought continues. “By day, you will track down the demon and save her body. By night, you will log in to Sanguis and take part in the quest we have set you, at the end of which you will hopefully save her soul.”
“But why?” Aremos asks. “What is this place?”
“It is a mod,” the dreadnought explains. “The mod to beat all mods. We created it to present more of a challenge to promising players, to bring those players in and train them as lieutenants, as our right-hand men. You will soon grow bored of Arkhart as your power increases. Even now, at just level thirty-one, you have seen how easily you can defeat, what?... a whole demon pirate ship, with just a couple of simple spells. Here, you will be challenged—you will fight enemies who will really fight you back.”
Aremos nods, his heart racing, his blood boiling. He’s ready, he’s up for it. “Well then … challenge accepted,” he growls.
The chair disappears, sending Aremos sprawling to the ground. The dreadnought also vanishes, as do six of the shades. The final one, whom Aremos recognizes as the one who nearly killed him in the street outside, floats over to him and drops a scroll.
“Everything you need to know to begin your quest is there,” it whispers.
“And my things… My sword, my effects. Where are they?” Aremos asks.
“Gone, Aremos. Such things are useless here. Here, your wits and your magics will be your greatest weapons. Rely on them, they will see you through.”
With that, the shade covers Aremos in its shadow, turning everything black. The world dissolves, and Aremos knows that he is unmanifesting.
Somera comes around with a gasp, her room appearing as if from nowhere. Her headset loosens, and she pulls it off as her finally rig shuts down, as she had told it to an hour ago.
What the heck just happened? she wonders.
But she, too, is excited. She feels the pull of Sanguis, the darkness, the raw power… It unsettles her, how eager she is. But she knows that she will go back for more: She will learn to hold her own in that bizarre, dark world. And she will rescue Meredith, body and soul.
Chapter Eight
The weeks that follow fly past in a bit of a blur. The day after her adventure in Sanguis, Somera enrolls at college, traveling there for the first time. It’s only five stops away by streetcar and she makes the journey with her eyes wide open, taking in the sights and smells and sounds of this strange new city, of San Francisco and the American people who call it home. The college itself is more than she’d ever expected, a shiny construct of crystalline glass and new, highly polished steel designed to the specifications of the most creative of architects. It sits on five acres of gardens and satellite buildings, so vast and busy that the new students are given maps as they line up in one of the main building’s many halls to sign in for the first time.
Offices and research and development suites are all packed into the Pixel Academy’s site, so that it serves as much an unofficial headquarters for Pixel’s parent company, Lynch Media, as anything else. Students mingle with executives in every corridor; designers and artists and programmers all seem busy, bustling about, as media communications specialists stride all the grounds, bawling into their phones.
Goodness, Somera thinks. It’s immense.
“But don’t worry, dear,” the kindly old American lady who deals with her enrollment says. “It’s all in here, your information pack.” She hands Somera a thick package with various papers and booklets inside. “And your classes are all fairly straightforward. There’s a corridor in C Block where most of the teaching goes on: As long as you learn your way there, you’ll be fine.” The smile stays on
the woman’s face as Somera thanks her and backs away, fighting once more through the throng.
C Block is indeed easy enough to find. It is a small glass atrium on the main building’s east side, with its own separate entrance so the students do not have to deal with the hubbub of the Academy’s research and business wings. Somera uses her swipe card to get in and the doors glide open, admitting her to the first of many orientation classes.
Her class comprises fifteen students, and there are six classes in her year. “You’ll see enough of each other in the coming semesters,” one of their teachers tells them at the first orientation. “Group projects, cross-class participation… You should leave with a good sense of who one another all are.”
However, it’s not so straightforward, Somera thinks as the first few days flash by. Her classmates all seem to fit together nicely, gravitating into a few groups. But they all seem so different from her. There are a couple of easterners like herself. A boy from Pakistan, one from India, and plenty of people from Japan, China, Malaysia… So many countries, in fact, that she loses track. But they all appear much the same to her—geeky young men who don’t know how to talk to women, or nerdy women who don’t know how to treat someone in a headscarf.
“It’s oppression, right?” one student asks her over lunch on the third day. “A way for men to keep women in their place?” The young woman asking is seventeen years old—a girl, really—from some South American country. Somera is willing to be patient with her because she’s so young, until she sees that everyone at their table has stopped talking, stopped eating, that they are all looking at her and nodding.
“Yeah, that’s what I always heard,” an American boy chips in.
“Actually, it’s more than that,” Somera begins. “It is a part of my identity, my spiritual self—”
But as she attempts to explain, they shrug it off and return to their earlier conversations, not paying her words any mind.
Such a large gulf segregates them from me, she thinks. But she takes to the classes well enough, finding them immensely interesting. They learn coding and game development. It really is just the basics this early on, but it fascinates to her to see it from this side. She has grown so used to experiencing finished products as a player, as a member of an MMORPG world, that exploring the nuts and bolts of the behind-the-scenes bits feels bizarre.
But nothing at school—absolutely nothing at all—engrosses her as much as Sanguis. Nothing else disengages her from her day-to-day activities like that nightmarish world, nothing else drives a wedge between herself and her classmates like the dark fantasy realm in which, every single night, she immerses herself to greater challenges and more spectacular adventures than Arkhart has ever offered her.
She spends every day in a kind of daze, so much so that she’s sure people think her stranger than they already would have. Her days are spent waiting, working, ticking away the seconds and the long, long minutes until she can get back to Sanguis. She manages to play both worlds well enough, completing both quests at a similar rate. In Arkhart, she has found the demon’s trail and is busy fighting her way through its minions, getting ever closer to its hidden lair in the dark islands beyond the shore. She has even hit on a couple of side quests built into the same mission, which earned her some treasure and a couple of useful artefacts.
And by night, she is drawn into the nightmare realm of Sanguis, wherein she’s forced to play by the dreadnoughts’ rules.
The first time she ventured back into the dark realm, the dreadnought whom she met on her first visit greeted her, materializing at the same spot at which Aremos manifested himself. “Well met, Aremos the Great.” He laughed, granting Aremos his soubriquet with the utmost irony. “So, you have accepted our challenge, conjuror?”
“I have,” Aremos replied. He unrolled the scroll given to him by the shade. “I have no mission, though: the scroll is blank.” He showed it to the dreadnought.
“Of course it is,” the dreadnought said. “How can you take on a mission—” He lashed out and sent Aremos flying. The dreadnought took off, hovering alongside Aremos, laughing all the while. Aremos crashed down a hundred feet away with his HP reduced by twenty percent as the dreadnought landed silently, gracefully next to him. “—when you do not know how to fight in our world?”
“So,” Aremos muttered, climbing to his feet, a little giddy. “How do I learn to fight?”
“On the job.” The dreadnought smiled. “We have people here like you, players who came in from Arkhart, thinking themselves worthy. And there are others, rogue programs, or real players logging in from the dark net, who pollute this world with their incompetence.”
“If they are like me, is this how you think of me?” Aremos asked.
The dreadnought’s smile grew. “Oh, no, Aremos.” They walked along together a little way, meandering through some blackened, scorched hills. “You were invited. As foolish and weak as you are, we saw promise in you. They … some of them fell through the cracks and must be dealt with.”
“Dealt with?” Aremos raised an eyebrow.
The dreadnought nodded. “For the time being, you are my hit man.” He waved his hand and a map appeared on the scroll. “Use it as you would the map of Arkhart,” he explained. “The red dots are your targets. Bring me their heads and show me that you are learning our ways. Bring me enough and I will allow you to begin your quest.”
“Why can you not give me my quest now? Why will you not let me start immediately?”
“Because you would be lazy with it … hubristic,” the dreadnought told him. “You need to earn it by fighting in this place, learning the rules of Sanguis.”
So now, it is Aremos’ job to engage in fights with other newcomers, eliminating them from the game servers entirely. Aremos finds it distasteful—these are people like him, not wicked monsters or evil, renegade casters. But he obeys, to the horror of the spirit child Somera who, much like him, finds that she cannot help but do the dreadnought’s bidding.
I want to grow strong, and this is the only way, they both think, and they both combine their efforts to make it be so.
The first time he hunted one of them down, a quiet excitement played in the back of Aremos’ mind. There’s a thrill to the mission as he finds his way through this new world. The dreadnought showed him where on the map he was to find his target, showed him a picture of the woman he was to kill, and told him a little bit about her.
“She is a fine sword master, an elf with prodigious skill, in your own world, back in Arkhart,” he said. “She learned about Sanguis from a friend of hers, who gave her the access codes she should never have had, and she has been making a nuisance of herself ever since.”
“If she’s so good, why do you not want her here?” Aremos asked. “Is she not a challenge for you… Or is she too much of one?”
“Do not be cheeky, Aremos,” the dreadnought scolded. He sneered at Aremos. As his eyes lit, Aremos found his HP decreasing rapidly for no apparent reason, until he was on his knees, choking. “I can still evaporate you on the spot, if I want…” The dreadnought laughed, a deep menace in his voice, before he carried on. “She is skilled—deadly, even. But she shows no aptitude for learning anything beyond the tip of her sword. There’s no room for growth: Arkhart is her natural limit, and I need you to remind her of this fact.”
The dreadnought clicked his fingers and Aremos’ HP returned, though his heart was still beating hard. And off Aremos set, alone and shaken, to track down this elven sword master.
It is dark, he thought, but I like it… I like it almost too much…
He opened a series of portals, making his way piece by piece to the other side of Sanguis. Each time Aremos stepped out, he looked around at yet another wicked landscape. But while the landscapes all shared the same sinister atmosphere, each was remarkably unique. Some were comprised of great, industrial-looking ziggurats whose bowels glowed with brimstone and evil sorcery. Some were cursed forests, rolling across the landscape as a dark
, endless procession. Some were beautiful and weird, as whole seas of molten silver washed against shorelines of onyx or wondrous creatures sang seductive songs designed to lure the idle and the weary to their deaths; one of Aremos’ favorites was a solitary mountain which, when he approached for a closer look, he saw was entirely carved from glass with darkly glowing runes etched all into it so that a nimbus of dark mist clung to it, poisoning the atmosphere.
Such creativity, such darkness, he thought, loving every second as he drank in more and more, opening his eyes to what was possible in this world.
Finally, he linked his portal to the right place. For some reason, he found he couldn’t skip about the map at will, as one could in Arkhart, and instead had to make these shorter, tiring leaps. It’s worth it though, he thought, for what I have been able to see.
The she-elf roamed about a dense, black jungle in which strange, large lizards had made their home. The tropical forest was humid and hot, and Aremos began sweating almost immediately. “There is great treasure to be found in that jungle, powerful artefacts,” the dreadnought had told him. “Beware not to fall into temptation as the elf has: She spends her days seeking out the greatest of our riches, convinced she will be able to turn herself into the ultimate weapon with their power—as if it could be done as easily as that.”
The elf was in the distance, hunting for the rich loot. Aremos could see her on his map, climbing an ancient, vine-covered, stepped pyramid atop a high hill in a rare forest clearing. He opened one last portal, leaping forward just a half mile or so, mid-way up the pyramid. The canopy stood far below, and the air up here felt mercifully cooler. The red moon hung low in the distance and a sickly white sun brushed the horizon, casting long, pained shadows everywhere.