Forever Fantasy Online

by Rachel Aaron

  Dutifully, James started running again, but that didn’t stop him from craning his neck in every direction as he tested out his newfound ability. When he looked directly up, he almost fell over. He’d heard the term “the dome of the heavens” before, but he’d never realized how accurate that was until he saw the pure, unpolluted sky filled with a curved sea of stars and pastel-colored nebulae. The sheer beauty of it brought tears to his eyes. He could have stared at it for hours, but the road took priority. Regaining his footing, James promised himself a better look when they stopped.

  Assuming they did stop. The last sunlight had been completely gone for hours, but Arbati still showed no sign of slowing. He kept a grueling pace, pushing them relentlessly down the road for what felt like forever. Finally, panting, sweaty, and hungry, they stopped for a break.

  James drank all the water in his pouch the moment he stopped moving. Digging into his bag of supplies, he found some delicious-smelling jerky and shoved that into his mouth as well. As he was tearing at the tough meat with his teeth, he noticed Arbati frowning at the scrubby grassland.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Arbati’s fierce eyebrows drew closer together. “The Red Canyon is not where it should be.”

  “Things have changed a lot,” James reminded him. “Maybe—”

  “I grew up in these plains,” the warrior snarled. “I know where things are supposed to be! To get to the gnolls’ village, we only have to take the trade road past the twin hills. There are some time-walker ruins by the road that mark where the old ghost creek is. We used to follow it the rest of the way when we went on raids, but the ruins aren’t here, and I haven’t heard the ghost creek yet.”

  Arbati’s face turned stricken. “The Nightmare ruined everything! Even when we are free, the world itself is twisted beyond repair. The Red Canyon is not where it was in the game or before, and I don’t know how to find it.”

  James winced at the implied “it’s all your fault,” but he wasn’t sure what to do. His mental map of the savanna had stopped making sense shortly after they’d left the village. He looked up at the beautiful stars for a clue, but unaided stellar navigation wasn’t a skill he’d had back home, let alone in a world with all-new stars. But just as he was getting caught up again in the beauty of the sparkling sky, he noticed something on the horizon. The stars to the south were harder to see due to a faint orange-tinted haze. His first thought was another nebula, but the sickly orange didn’t match the other streaks of color in the sky. It looked more like…

  Light pollution! James didn’t have a map of the savanna zone anymore, but light pollution could only mean a large settlement. There were only two of those in this entire zone, and one was nearly a hundred miles behind them.

  “Arbati!”

  The warrior turned around, his eyes narrowing at James for the sin of reminding him that he existed. James ignored it, pointing at the glow on the horizon instead. Arbati’s gaze followed his finger, and the warrior nodded with a grunt. They finished their jerky, then they both took off through the tall grass in that direction.

  As they moved silently through the grass like lions in the night, it struck James that he was honest-to-god prowling. The wildness thrilled him, but the best were the magics of the earth and life that curled up to meet his hands from the ground. The power of an entire world lay beneath him, making James feel alive in a way he never had before. He’d also never been so aware of the fact that he had claws and fangs. A small bird chirped as he slid by, and his ears twitched. Prey.

  The word was still moving through his mind when he was seized by a sudden urge to pounce. He wanted to snatch the bird from its perch in the grass so he could eat it hot, raw, and twitching. He was imagining how delicious it would be when the James part of his mind came back, and the thought of eating a bloody, living bird went from awesome to disgusting in a heartbeat. All the feelings of animal power and natural connection fled with it, leaving him self-conscious as he looked down at his claws.

  They weren’t nearly as large as those on a predator of his size should have been since jubatus were humanoid tool users, not actual giant cats, but the small, dark points still felt alien. Everything did. Now that he was thinking again instead of losing himself in the physical joy of prowling through the night, his whole body felt unknown, like it belonged to someone else. For the first time since he’d woken up here, the thought I’m not human crossed his mind.

  James took a bitter breath. It was so unfair. If someone back home had asked him, “Hey, wanna become a magical cat-person with amazing powers?” he would have been all over it. He could have made a human Naturalist, after all. He’d chosen this body because he’d loved the idea of being a jubatus, but he was finding the reality to be less on the exciting end of the spectrum and much more into disturbing territory. He’d already seen how his new instincts could take over his rational mind. Even now, the idea of eating a raw bird didn’t sound that bad, and that terrified him. Was he in danger of losing his humanity like this?

  His existential crisis was interrupted by an impatient snarl, and James’s head shot up to see Arbati waiting impatiently for him beside a scrubby tree. The warrior motioned for him to come over, and James obediently slunk through the grass. He wasn’t sure why Arbati had stopped until the warrior hauled himself up into the tree. When James followed, using his claws to scale the stout trunk all the way to the topmost branches, he understood.

  Red Canyon was directly in front of them. He hadn’t been able to see it until now because of the high grass and the gentle hill they’d been climbing. Now that they’d cleared the crest, though, the canyon’s deep scar in the ground and the brightly lit gnoll village beside it were clearly visible just half a mile away. But while there was no question this was their destination, the village was not what James remembered.

  Back in the old vanilla FFO days, this place had been the worst of all the leveling grinds. Since the Red Canyon quests were necessary to complete the savanna zone story, the developers had purposefully lowered the monster density to discourage farming and drag out the time it took to level up. The result had been a mostly empty village populated exclusively by soldiers and their bosses, but the settlement in front of him now was nothing like that at all.

  The city—for this was no village—was enormous, sprawling across multiple hills and sticking far out into the grassland. It was bordered on one side by the deep gash of the Red Canyon, which split the earth like a cleft. The remaining three sides were guarded by a twenty-foot-high wall made from the canyon’s namesake crimson sandstone and topped with wide wooden battlements. Burning braziers lit up the border wall every fifty feet, highlighting the multiple patrols walking its ramparts, and even a few light catapults.

  That was all definitely new, but the walls and the soldiers weren’t the only change. From his vantage point in the tree on the hill, James could see over the barricade into the fortress itself, which was no longer a shabby collection of mud huts. Instead, the gnoll city was a grid of stone buildings laid out with military precision. Packs of patrols marched through the well-lit dirt streets, and ember-dotted smoke rose from numerous forges, their windows glowing brightly from the huge bellows fires inside.

  That last one made James’s blood run cold. The zone plot for the savanna had always involved the undead raising an army of gnolls to conquer Windy Lake, but the result had always looked like more of a rabid pack of hyenas than an actual fighting force. This, though—this was a true army, complete with what appeared to be a functional military base. Huge packs of gnolls were moving supplies into warehouses and bringing up wagons of mysteriously marked crates from the canyon below, where the lich and his officers lurked.

  All of that was very troubling, but what really worried James for their immediate mission was how much tighter security was in this new version of the gnoll town. In addition to the patrols and the bonfires at every intersection, there were multiple checkpoints with guard stations. What really set his fur on end, t
hough, were the long rivers of nature magic covering the city’s walls. Magic he could feel throbbing all the way out here.

  “Crap,” he whispered, crouching low on his branch. “That’s a raid-level ward.”

  “Is that a problem for you?” Arbati whispered back.

  James gave him a shocked look. “Dude, raids take fifty players! It’s not something I can handle solo.”

  If this were still a game, a barrier like that would have taken an entire questline to bring down. A very long one, involving multiple group-quests. Since this ward was a new development, James had no idea if the old standards still applied, but he was certain they didn’t have time for them. He wasn’t certain how long they’d been running through the dark, but it had to be close to midnight by now. Lilac had been poisoned at dawn, which James believed meant that they had until the next dawn to save her. That timeline didn’t allow for surprise giant questlines, but other than catapulting themselves over the wall into the patrols, there didn’t seem to be a way around.

  “This is going to be harder than I thought.”

  Arbati sneered at him. “Oh, so you aren’t just going to walk in there and kill everything, then?”

  “You know I lost my gear,” James snapped. “Even with my legendary equipment, though, I don’t think this would be solo-able. There’s thousands of gnolls down there, and that ward will cook us if we try to sneak over.”

  “Then we won’t go over,” Arbati said, pointing at the Red Canyon on the other side of the fortress. “That side has no walls, and the lich we need resides at the bottom, correct?”

  “Yeah,” James said, impressed the warrior had remembered. “But it’s not as simple as just climbing down the canyon. Remember what I said about there being a questline to access the dungeon?”

  Arbati nodded. “The one you said you were going to handle.”

  “Yeah, well, the gnolls used to have three leaders, kind of like chieftains. When the undead arrived, those three guys sold the rest of the gnolls out in exchange for immortality and power. The catch was that, in exchange for all that power, each one of those traitor chieftains had to give up a shard of their life essence to help maintain an anti-living barrier over the dungeon’s entrance. If we climb down there while that barrier is still in place, we’ll be trapped like rats between the gnolls at the top and the undead at the bottom.”

  “So we kill the chieftains and remove the barrier,” Arbati said with a shrug. “Easy enough. I kill gnolls all the time.”

  “Not like these,” James cautioned. “Don’t forget. This place was balanced for player parties. Those undead chieftains are all three-skull bosses. They’re built to challenge at least five same-level players, which for this area means level thirty. By the way, you’re level fifty and two-skull rated, or at least you were in the game. That should give you the advantage, but don’t expect any easy fights. This place was one of the first dungeon questlines put into FFO. It’s famously brutal, especially the third boss, Gore Maul, the Chief of Chiefs. He’s probably the most dangerous thing out here other than the lich himself.”

  Arbati snorted with disdain. “I do not fear a gnoll.”

  “Dude, I’m serious,” James said. “Gore Maul is some three-and-a-half-skull bullshit from back when the game devs didn’t know how to balance bosses properly. He’s the reason most veteran players skip this zone. Dude does colossal damage, has ludicrous armor, attacks fast, and has a massive health pool. I’ve seen him wipe entire parties, and that’s when the players knew what they were doing. He’s so feared, there’s even a special Halloween event where he—”

  “So how do we beat him?” Arbati said impatiently. “I know players didn’t quest through here in large groups all the time. How did they kill him?”

  “By following the quests,” James said. “All the gnoll bosses have special quests you can do to reduce them from three-skull status to two. That means they’ll still take two players to beat, but we’re both over-level, so we shouldn’t have any trouble.”

  He went on to detail each of the three questlines that could be used to weaken the bosses of the village. It was classic FFO stuff like getting bodyguards drunk, stealing a special poison, and finding a locket to remind one of its long-lost love. Unfortunately, each boss’s storyline required four to five quests’ worth of effort. As he explained this, James became more and more aware of just how impossible their task was given the time frame, not to mention doing it all inside a highly secure military camp without being discovered.

  This must have occurred to Arbati as well, because the head warrior was uncharacteristically silent during his explanation. By the time James finished, Arbati was just staring down at the village, his long tail twitching as he thought.

  The uncharacteristic silence went on for so long, James finally asked, “Are you okay?”

  “Lilac is my little sister,” the warrior said from his perch in the tree beside James.

  “I know, dude,” James said gently. “I’m worried about my little sister, too. But we can do this. We just figure out a way in, then—”

  James cut off as he heard yip-yipping from below. Clutching the branch he was crouching on, he peered down through the leaves to see a patrol of six gnolls coming through the grass. Waiting with absolute stillness, James held his breath as the pack walked up to their tree and sat down beneath it, snickering at each other casually. When he realized the patrol was just taking a break, James let his breath out silently. He was about to signal to Arbati that everything was okay when he felt something land between his shoulder blades.

  It was a boot. Arbati had leaned down from his branch to plant his boot in James’s back. When he looked up in horror, the warrior’s cat eyes flashed in the dark.

  “You will be of use to me one way or the other, James,” he whispered. Then with that menacing statement, the jubatus kicked him out of the tree.

  In the silence of the night, the breaking of branches and the yowling sound James made as he fell were astonishingly loud. The patrol of gnolls began barking as James hurtled down. Half-way to the ground, some jubatus instinct took over, and James twisted to land on his feet, but the beautiful recovery was ruined as he landed right on top of a gnoll.

  The hyena-men scattered and drew their weapons. Grossly outnumbered, James hopped off the wiggling gnoll and put his hands up in what he hoped was a universal sign of surrender. Thankfully, the gnolls didn’t attack. They just kept their weapons on him, yipping at each other in discussion.

  As they talked, James was sorely tempted to drag Arbati into this. The damn cat had just thrown him to the hyenas. He’d deserve it if James outed him, especially since the patrol he’d “accidentally” fallen into were now making suggestive chopping motions with their paws. But as hot as James’s resentment at being thrown to the gnolls burned, he was starting to see the plan. If the gnolls took him prisoner, they’d have to open the gates to take him in. That meant opening the ward, which would be their chance to get inside.

  James locked his fangs in outrage. He hated it, but assuming the gnolls didn’t kill him here, it wasn’t actually a bad plan. So instead of revealing his frenemy in the tree, James swallowed his pride and kept his hands up, doing his best to look nonthreatening as the gnolls debated his fate.

  “Um,” James said as their deliberations dragged on. “I surrender.”

  Whether it was coincidence or them actually understanding him, the gnolls’ chopping motions stopped, and two gnolls stepped forward to mash James down to the ground. Once he was down, the rest of the patrol jumped in to help tie him up. Finally, he was hoisted onto their shoulders and hauled off toward the town.

  As the gnolls marched him down the hill and along the red stone walls to the gates, James took his chance to get a better look at the ward. As he’d noted from the tree, it was entirely nature magic, glowing green and smelling of the wilds. He was squinting at the giant patterns, trying to work out exactly what they did, when the gnolls reached the giant doors that opened i
nto the fortress. When they arrived, the glowing green magic snuffed out, and the wooden gate cracked open just wide enough for his captors to wiggle through.

  As the gates swung shut again, James saw a shadow flit through behind them at the last second, followed by a faint breeze that smelled of jubatus. Then they passed the gate guards, and the familiar scent was overpowered by the reek of rotten flesh. Twisting to see what could make such a stench, James saw that the guards were not living gnolls but decaying zombie ones with rotting fur and flesh hanging from their exposed bones.

  His captors dropped their eyes when they passed the undead and made double time into the Red Canyon city. As they entered the militarized town, James saw many more zombie gnolls standing at guard posts like unblinking statues. The undead didn’t talk to the living gnolls at all, but their burning white ghostfire eyes watched everything.

  From the way their hackles went up, James got the impression that the undead scared his gnoll captors, but things really got interesting when a tiny tremor rattled the gravel in the street. That little shake must have been significant, because the patrol stopped in its tracks, the gnolls quivering in terror as the distant booming sounded again.

  Within seconds, every living gnoll on the street except for the ones carrying James scattered. Trembling, James’s escort hauled him into a nearby hut, closing the wooden door as the booms grew louder. Their fear was infectious, and James found himself breaking into a cold sweat as the crashes stopped in the street just outside their hut.

  The firelight coming through the gaps in the wooden door vanished, and a rotten stench began to seep in, making James’s eyes water. In the dark, he could see ribbons of death magic floating through the air like hunting snakes. There was a loud snort outside, then the reeking shadow moved on, thumping away down the terrified street.