The Heroes met, adventured together, betrayed one another, reconciled, and even married (choice of Leira and Brennan or Leira and Prendar; I went with the latter). Lorac recovered the Staff of Wizardry and became the evil Dark Lorac for a while. Leira and Prendar ended up leading an army against the other two, and even had a son.
The Lich King rose, the last Elven Firstcomer died, and her knowledge was lost forever.
And of course they explored about a thousand dungeons and had a thousand adventures. There was the urban conspiracy one. The icy northern one that explained the elven tribes, the one about the swamplands, the one about the dwarven empires, the weird plane-traveling one, the forestlands, the drowned ruins one, the vampire one.
The Heroes saved the world and acquired vast riches, as one does, but when next we would meet them they were always back to square one, broke and first-level. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
After that… things got weird. If you paged through enough rule supplements and unofficial spin-offs you could find rules for almost anything—rules in case characters dimension-traveled into the Old West or postapocalyptic Earth, for example.
The Soul Gem turned the time line back on itself, stretching and looping it forever. The Heroes even turned up in the First Age from time to time. Rumor had them fighting in the final siege of Chorn, or seeking out Adric from his wandering years and putting him on the path homeward. People said Leira’s child was Adric’s and was the true heir to the crown before he fell. Or that one day the far-future heroes Pren-Dahr, Ley-R4, Loraq, and Brendan Blackstar would travel back in time to save the Third Age, or perhaps doom it, whatever that means—people are always dooming things in fantasy. The Third Age kind of doomed everything anyway.
As I thought of it, the First Age was like childhood, years of long-ago upheaval, trauma, and unbearable longing, during which our characters were formed.
The Second Age was high school. Battle lines were drawn, alliances hardened into place, strategies tested, scars acquired. The crimes committed in this Age would fester for millennia.
And the Third Age was everything after, when we went our separate ways and order was restored but nothing quite forgiven or forgotten. There was also a Fourth Age no one much bothered with, which marked the retreat of magic into mere legend and superstition and the ascendancy of humankind—i.e., the time when we grew up and got boring and our hearts, generally speaking, died.
I gathered there was a certain amount of armchair quarterbacking in the lower ranks of Black Arts, about how we were a little too loyal to the Realms of Gold thing. Don still believed the franchise had legs, that with the right game behind it, RoG could be as big as Final Fantasy or Warcraft, with bestselling tie-in novels, conventions, maybe a movie. But for now it was just another medieval pastiche, a sub-Narnian, off-brand Middle-earth, waiting to be a forgotten part of somebody’s adolescence, all the knights and ladies and dragon-elves left behind along with high school detention and Piers Anthony novels.
On the other hand, there were, out there, players who genuinely cared about the third Correllean dynasty, who read the cheaply ghostwritten tie-in novels, who were emotionally invested in the war against the House of Aerion, and who considered the death of Prince Vellan Brightsword in the Battle of Arn to be an event that genuinely diminished the amount of goodness and light in the world.
But it wasn’t as if Black Arts suffered from an exaggerated reverence for its own intellectual property. Maybe at first, but all the high-fantasy gravitas in the world wouldn’t survive the sight of Lorac hiking up his robes to nail a tricky hardflip-to-manual transition in Pro Skate ’Em Endoria: Grind the Arch-Lich.
The four crowded awkwardly into the skate shop.
“What are we doing here?” Brennan said, gazing around at racks of boards and skatewear.
“I think it’s important,” whispered Leira. “I think we’re here for a reason.”
Lorac scowled. “This is humiliating.”
“Shred regular or goofy-foot?” asked the teenager behind the counter.
“Regular?” Brennan said uncertainly. Leira and Prendar shrugged—regular would be fine. After an agonizing pause, Lorac replied, “Goofy.”
The skate shop attendant showed them an array of possible T-shirts. Lorac chose a black one. He was a necromancer, after all.
They found themselves in the parking lot of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Elementary.
“Skate!” cried the arch-lich. “Skate!”
Brennan scanned the others’ faces grimly. “Aye. We will skate.”
They learned to ollie and nollie and heelflip and air it out and, yes, grind. Prendar kept an eye out for cop cars while Leira tentatively worked out half-pipe moves in a concrete spillway to a grunge-and-speed-metal sound track. Lorac had promise as a tech skateboarder; Brennan went in for vert. When perfected, his double-handed Decapitation-Vacation 360-degree grab raked in a huge bonus.
They improved. They got licensing deals and won competitions. And there really were moments when GtA-L came mind-bendingly close to working. Prendar gliding through the suburban gloom, elf ears glimpsed for a moment under a streetlight, then just a shadow as he rounded the corner of a Safeway and disappeared. Lorac closed his eyes a moment as he rolled down the long hill toward downtown, felt the sun on his face, set aside, for the time being, his long years of study, the price of his arcane knowledge, the doom waiting for him. He ollied to grind the curb, nollied into a 360 to land clean. He grinned.
When Leira managed a handplant on the edge of an abandoned public pool to the cranked-up sound of surfpunk guitar, it almost made sense of the insanity, her body extended almost vertically in the last light of day, her arm straight on the lip, supporting her body, her back arched against the sunset, orange light glinting liquid off the centuries-old katana strapped to her back and pouring over the grass that was poking through the concrete, over the trash piled against a sagging chain-link fence.
“Skate! Skate, or taste the wrath of the arch-lich!”
That night as I was falling asleep I noticed a light through the crack under the cheap door dividing my apartment’s two rooms. At first I thought the refrigerator door hadn’t closed, but when I looked, I found that the Four Heroes of Endoria had showed up to visit.
It was unexpected, and I wasn’t set up for company; in fact, I had exactly one card table and one folding chair, which Lorac the wizard had claimed. They were a striking quartet, larger than life, angular in the way of computer models.
Their glowing, pixelated forms took up a surprising amount of room. Brennan was nearly seven feet tall, and his broad shoulders seemed to swallow up the entire kitchen.
“What are you doing in my kitchen?” I asked them.
“My friend, the time has come to embark on our quest,” he said in the smooth baritone of the semiprofessional voice actor who recorded his dialogue.
I guessed, sure, we were friends, in a way.
“You are the chosen one,” said Princess Leira, who leaned against the sink. She had the requisite Amazonian figure, full red lips, and jet black hair. She had bright eyes and a mouth that drooped at the corners, which gave her smile an appealing, sheepish quality. She wore a traveling cloak, which was a relief; some of her costumes were pretty revealing.
“Chosen for what? What quest?” I asked. “I don’t understand. Am I supposed to find something?” We were always finding things in games. Rings, books, crowns.
“You’re the one we need,” said Prendar the thief, a tall, pale half elf with sandy red hair and black eyes. “A man of courage and strength, but also guile.”
I’d never seen an elf up close before. From a distance they were graceful, elegant beings, but from a few feet away Prendar was vibrantly inhuman. You’d think an elf would have a cute snub nose, but his was long and beaky. Maybe it was his human father’s. I’d never heard the word guile used in a conversation, either.
“Russell, we entreat your help,” intoned the magus. “Our worlds are in
great danger, and only you can save them.” His cloak stiff with whorls of gold thread, Lorac spoke with a theatrical old-guy quaver. He was an Arabian Nights character, an exotic older man with a Levantine cast, a thin, crooked nose, and a neatly trimmed beard. His staff was too long, and he brushed the dusty lighting fixture with it. “Sorry.”
“But you’re the Heroes,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense for you to talk to humans.”
“We’re all in the game, Russell,” Leira said. “We’re characters, but you’re the player. We need you.”
“A great danger is coming,” said Brennan. “Greater than any we have ever faced.”
“Beware Adric! Beware the grieving blade!” Leira whispered breathlessly.
“Just play the game, asshole,” Prendar snapped, and drew on a cigarette.
“Wait… what game?” I said. “Realms VI? VII?”
“The Ultimate Game,” sing-songed Lorac. He began to laugh. They must have gotten a really good voice actor. Looking closer, I saw that his staff had a small animal skull on the end of it. It might have been a ferret’s. The ferret’s eyes glowed.
I fell asleep again, and this time dreamed I was still at work but there was an extra office marked Secret Projects, and I went in and found Simon there where he’d been all along and he told me how he’d built the Ultimate Game and it was just a golden ring, and he said he’d already spoken the wish and tomorrow the five of us would wake up and be fantasy adventurers together like I’d always wanted. I’d get to be the elf. I started crying right then and there, I just thought, what a relief, because I remembered now how much I wanted it. How had I forgotten that?
Chapter Nine
Hey, Matt, are there any magic swords in the Realms universe?” I asked.
There was no reason for preamble; Matt got thrown these questions. Black Arts didn’t have an archivist. The closest we had was Matt. He did the research to find out what make of Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in 1945, and what breed of horse a Knight Templar might have ridden. He was consistently cheerful, and he was Black Arts’ biggest fan. He’d read every comic book and novel adaptation and was an authority on the past and future histories of the Black Arts multiverse. Although for all I knew, he made up the answers on the spot.
“Oh! Well.” Matt thought a moment, then drew a breath. “I mean, there’s the usual ones, plus one, plus two, that kind of thing. There’s flaming swords, ice swords, vorpal. Silver, not really magic, but it interacts with those systems. There’s Sunshard, pluses against undead. Daemonsbane—obviously—a bunch of other… banes, giants, and stuff. You can make one out of star metal if you have the right equipment, that’s pretty good. There was a place you could find a vibro-sword from Solar Empires, that was just in as a joke. And, well, there’s the Rainbow Blade, has a bunch of different effects.”
I was impressed, by his humility, if nothing else. He always talked as if he were ticking off the obvious points everyone knew.
“Are there any evil swords?”
“Evil… swords…. Nothing comes to mind, not swords, anyway. Staff of the Ancients turned out evil, obviously. The DireSpear. At high level, antipaladins manifest burning swords as a class attribute. I don’t think the blades themselves are aligned, but I can check.”
“Huh. Where would I start looking? Like, Realms I?”
“Oh, man… oh, man. I don’t even know if you could. I don’t know if even Simon and Darren had a copy, or one that would run, anyway. The thing was written in COBOL.”
Black Arts had a game library of sorts, three gray metal bookshelves bolted to the wall between the Realms art pit and the kitchen. They were stacked unevenly with all the collected debris of four or five insular, feverish midadolescences. Rows and then boxes of fantasy and science fiction novels with doubles and triples of anything in the golden-age SFF canon—the Dune books took up their own shelf. Stacked, hand-labeled videocassettes of films someone considered essential reference (Aliens, The Dark Crystal, and Ladyhawke were visible on top), Dungeons & Dragons modules containing scribbled marginalia, Avalon Hill board games, stacks of comic books, an unused dictionary and thesaurus, a separate section for art books, histories of medieval architecture, and color plates of Vallejo and Frazetta and Whelan and Mead and Piranesi.
And of course stacks and stacks of computer games in no particular order. Most of them were in their original boxes, with worn corners and sprung seams after the long, rough trips from home to dorm room to apartment to apartment before arriving here.
Old consoles; the beetlelike curve of a SEGA Genesis; the triple-pronged Nintendo 64 controller.
I picked one up, already dusty and faded only a few years after being state of the art. Quest of the White Eagle. On the cover a blandly handsome teenage boy in a white T-shirt and jeans and an eighties feathered haircut hung in midair, frozen in the act of leaping eagerly from the sidewalk into a glowing doorway hanging a few inches off the ground. He was grinning madly, obviously overjoyed to be getting the fuck out. Behind him, a dark-haired girl watched, lost in admiration.
The boy was already halfway through; his shoulder and arm emerged on the portal’s far side wearing a medieval tunic and gripping a sword. There, the same teenage girl awaited, with an identical expression but wearing longer hair and dressed only in a few shreds of chain mail and a tiara. The back of the box showed an actual screenshot—blocky, pixelated stick figures.
All the Black Arts games were there, a few still shrink-wrapped, going back to 1988’s Clandestine, the official first release under the label. Realms I was the kind of game that never had a commercial release. It was an underground classic that had been swapped over BBSes in the mid-1980s and been passed from hand to hand in the form of eight floppy disks bundled with rubber bands. I was sure a few dozen copies were out there lying in basements in cardboard boxes, filed away with cracked copies of The Bilestoad and Lode Runner.
I opened a few of the older boxes, shifted piles of loose graph paper, manila envelopes holding mostly 3.25-inch disks (“crispies”), even opened up and shook out a couple of the larger books in case a few floppies had been tucked inside and forgotten. There wasn’t much from 1983 apart from an incomplete set of blue-and-white Ultima III: Exodus floppies.
It turned out there was a whole room in Black Arts that was just all of Simon’s stuff. He had an apartment of sorts but he wasn’t that invested in it. The rest of it was here at the office, where he’d slept most of the time anyway. Don and Darren had gone through Simon’s notebooks page by page in search of the breakthrough they’d announced, and there was nothing, but I looked through their inventory list anyway.
Items included:
2 wooden stools
1 folding breakfast table
1 Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner
1 SEGA Genesis video game console, controllers missing
1 set of bed linens, soiled
numberless paperback books
countless graphic novels of the 1980s
1 colander, plastic
diverse pieces of silverware
1 bowl
1 plate
1 sword
5 desk lamps w/o lightbulb
1 dot matrix printer
4 reams printer paper
1 shoe hanger, shoeless
1 Marriott rewards card, expired
7 unlabeled VHS tapes, which all turned out to hold episodes of My So-Called Life
1 framed Boris Vallejo print, signed
I’d just given up and was looking through the manual of some old White Wolf game when a slip of notepad paper fell out. It was graph paper. Across the top it read REALMS OF GOLD: ADRIC’S TOMB. It held a few short paragraphs in what was definitely Simon’s handwriting.
They’d always despised him. Called him a freak and a madman. But in the end he would save them all. Alone, grieving, he made his stand.
Adric would still be the last to pass through to safety. He rested with his back to the emerald portal half a mile under ground, in the
depths of Chorn, his family’s fortress.
All was silent and black save the light of the glowing portal, light that gleamed on Adric’s alien features, the pale skin and high cheekbones. Beyond, in the darkness, he heard the padding of immense paws, the clack of bone against marble. He rested a hand on the hilt of the black runesword at his side.
A smile curled Adric’s lips. He drew the ancient black blade from its jeweled sheath, felt its tainted energy flow into him. He thought of his father and brothers, all fled to safety; he thought of Arlani’s beautiful face. He thought of Glendale, the home he would never see again.
He looked back at the portal, thinking of the woman he loved but would never marry, the children he would never see. He heard clawed feet on the marble floor and guttural speech. A split-hound had arrived, dragging itself forward, urged on by lesser wargs, mockingly bearing on its brow the Hyperborean Crown itself.
Adric welcomed it. He turned his face from the portal, an eerie light in his green eyes. With one last glance at Arlani’s fallen form, he drew
The writing cut off. Sophomore year was ending. One day high school itself would end and the future would begin—long after the TRS-80 would be obsolete, after sixteen colors became 256 colors became millions of colors; long after sophomore year would be over, they’d have 3-D graphics like in TRON and computer games so real it would be like living in the world of D&D. I remembered believing that.
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