You

by Austin Grossman

  Its real effect, ultimately, was to limit the extent of the Black Arts audience—not everyone wanted to take these games that seriously. Sometimes they just wanted to goof around and try things. On the other hand, it also created a hardened core of Black Arts loyalists who would buy every game and who at parties would get into long philosophical arguments about the use of the Save command in games.

  And no one, anywhere, knew what the letters in WAFFLE stood for.

  “Okay, now what?”

  “Play the damn game,” said Prendar.

  A small plaza well back in the merchants’ quarter. A modest cobblestone circular plaza and, in the center, a worn-down statue of a bear on its hind legs silhouetted black against the purpling sky.

  It’s almost nightfall when Leira sees the tavern’s light ahead, the Duke and Dancer. A shield hangs on the wall outside, the griffin sigil of Darren’s old kingdom. She ducks under the low door frame and steps inside. Self-conscious, she keeps a hand on the hilt of one long blade just to make sure it’s still there. There are two lanterns hanging from a thick wooden beam overhead, a beam that must have been cut from a hundred-year-old tree, a tree that probably never heard a word of Common spoken in its lifetime. A fire is going at the far end of the room, and everything smells like wood smoke and beer and sweaty people. It’s warm after a day of walking in the rain, and her cloak steams a little. The stew is salty and the dark ale is bitter and incredibly good.

  The tavern is full of two dozen men, and Leira is comfortable being lost in the din. She’s small and used to not being noticed; it’s a talent. Most of the men are farmers and craftsmen, there every night of their lives, but the inn hosts a few travelers, too.

  She thinks back over the day’s walk. Video game characters are only half there except when you’re involved. But the whole saga is built around their roles in the world, half you, half them, a grand-scale millennial puppet theater.

  You know from writing the TDR that as a playable character Leira has a high movement rate and great bonuses on ranged attacks. But you know so much more about her, even more than the computer does, because inside the outlines there is what you put into them, so much more memory and awareness and feeling, a whole country of it. And as the evening wears on, she thinks, or perhaps you think, about a summer night in a storybook castle long ago, before the wars began.

  You had skin under your fingernails. The prince crouched, cursing, and spat on the floor. You scanned the gallery. It was empty. The mirrored walls showed only candlelight, paneling, your strange, ashen face.

  The ball was still at its height. It was the day you’d been looking forward to since you turned thirteen, the thing you’d lorded over your younger sisters. You were going to have a ball. You were wearing the pale green dress you’d forgone a horse for, and saw for the first time how poorly it suited you. You heard your father’s too-loud laugh over the music and the crowd. You tried to imagine how you would explain this to him. It seemed so implausible. You had always been the proper lady to your sister’s tomboy. You were the one they expected to marry off early. Nothing was going to prevent that—or was it?

  Flustered, you cast around and settled on a silver candlestick. You held on to your skirt with one hand to keep from tripping over it as you swung the other hand in a broad, hearty sidearm motion that brought the candlestick’s thick, square base into contact with the prince’s kneecap. It must be midnight by now, you thought, and there were an enormous number of decisions to be made in a short time.

  Enter Lorac. He has low hit points and armor but above-average foot speed. He has high intelligence, a wisdom bonus, three extra languages. Metal armor is forbidden; metal weapons are used at a major penalty. The spell caster allows four specialties. All magic items operate with a bonus. There is a 20 percent chance that he will be able to evade the effects of cursed items.

  In Realms III Lorac has a range of powers that get him through his obstacles. A gesture that lets him drift slowly through the air instead of falling; a word that shatters nearby objects. For all his age, he looks unruffled by the obstacles. When the rain comes he adjusts his hat, but that’s all. In town he gets to choose new robes. When he enters the tavern he gives Leira a sidelong look but doesn’t speak to her. In the firelight he looks a little like one of the three kings of the Nativity scene.

  He wasn’t a king but he might have been a king’s vizier, a cunning man and master of many subtle arts. One of the ones who secretly lusts for power, and one day he betrays the king.

  Why? It’s hard to remember, just that every step seemed at the time like the logical and smart and easy way to play it. Maybe it wasn’t before, but now it’s what you do. It’s your story.

  You saw your moment. The king wasn’t watching, and you stole the key to the royal aviary, in which there was a magic bird whose magic songs foretold the future. Of course it went wrong. You’re not royalty and you’re not the hero of the story. You’re just a civil servant with a prelaw degree and a flair for languages. What made you think you could hang with the royals? Princes and kings have this kind of story in their blood.

  When the king came back you panicked like a fool. Your sorcery lit the tower, but he tossed you into the moat anyway. It was the birdseed you bought, in the marketplace, the day you were wearing that disguise. It wasn’t that good a disguise, was it? Who knew a king would have those kinds of connections on the street? If they’d enacted the educational reforms you’d asked for, those fucking urchins would have been in school, where they belong.

  The townsfolk threw vegetables as you limped, dripping and sobbing, through town. The worst of it is, that king really liked you. He was a genuinely nice guy, never made you feel bad about the money thing from the first day you roomed together. As vizier you lived at the palace, ate with his family, played with his children, showed everybody magic tricks, and told stories from your early life, before the days of jewelry and fancy hats.

  You pawned your scepter of office for enough money to book passage out of the kingdom. No more dining on pheasant, no more carpets, no more starlit desert nights. You never wanted to see that place again. There are other lands, other kingdoms. You walked north until no one had heard of your crimes. You’ll go as far as your movement points will take you.

  You rode on barges, slept out on deck under the stars, bargained with men in their own tongues. At first your academic diction marked you as a stranger, but gradually you picked up their vernacular rhythms, dropped the subject and your fancy tenses. You crossed the continent’s central desert in the company of a caravan, entertained their children with fire tricks from a first-year alchemy class you dug out of your memory. In return, a wiry, tan man taught you the basics of fighting with a short blade by grabbing your arms and yanking them into position. You left the caravan at the foot of a mountain range, and you kept going.

  In the mountains you learned another form of magic, whatever’s fast and cheap. There was no time for a three-hour warm-up, and there was no place to get powdered peacock bone; there was only time to shout or make a rapid sketch in the dirt. You lay by your fire, looking up at the stars, and your days at the academy, your days in the king’s court, all of it seemed far off, which is what you’d like, really. Farther, if you could possibly get it.

  On the far side of the mountain, the country was different. You met your first dwarves. They’d heard of your country, but maybe one in four could name the king, and none could speak the language.

  You moved north through the forest lands while the long summer lasted, following the track of a lazy green river. At night you heard bats hunting in the warm air. You crossed a low stone wall that once marked the border of a farm. No one had lived there for centuries. You had never felt that alone, or that free. After weeks of travel you reached the northern ocean, and walked east.

  Caracalla is a city you didn’t know, a northern city that trades with the hunting and mining tribes. No one you knew, no one from your family, had ever been there. At first, trades
men looked askance at your currency. You decided to wait a few days before booking passage north.

  You slept alone at an inn that first night, lying awake long into the dark. The city was never quite silent. You heard bells, here and there a shout, the yowl of a cat, or hooves. You smelled horses, dirt, the ocean.

  In the darkness you thought again about who you were before this, a life you remember less and less well, but what you remember doesn’t flatter you. You remembered lying to people about what you were thinking and feeling. You remembered constantly thinking about how unhappy you were. It was very different from the way you are now, before you wore a dagger and slept in forests.

  You fell asleep trying to count days, trying to guess how many weeks are left before the snow will cut off the mountain passes. In the morning you learned how to negotiate with a sailor. You’re not sure if you’re here for forgetfulness or redemption, but you notice they’re not calling you a vizier anymore. They call you a wizard.

  Brennan has an easy time on the road. High strength, endurance, hit points, medium speed. All weapons usable, bonus with long sword or dagger. When the rain comes he lets it fall on his broad bare shoulders, but ties his long hair up in a bun over his round, boyish face. Bandits are nothing to him, he’s—God, twelfth level or something. He faced down the spider queen herself in her mountain lair. He can let his mind wander.

  There was a yellow patch in the snow by the side of the roadway. They stood around it, eight of them, mildly puzzled. There was a faint smell of wood smoke, but otherwise the mountains were silent.

  Your two cousins exchanged glances behind your back. They were each fifteen years older, almost twice your age, but a few inches shorter. You outranked them by birth, but they’d ridden this way a dozen times before, and the bearers had long since stopped looking at you for confirmation of your orders.

  Your father was getting older, and your brother was spending more and more time running the place, so it was your turn to ride out with the annual tribute caravan, through the pass and over the mountains you’d heard of but never seen, carrying your family’s third-best sword to the stronghold of the House of Aerion.

  “Bandits, maybe. We’ll go have a look,” Eran said, the dark one. The two older men set off through the trees, up a short ridge and out of sight, one looking back to make sure you and the others stayed put. But the snow was half a foot deep and it was getting on to sunset, and the other men got cold fast. The wait was awkward; the party had run out of things to chat about an hour into the first day.

  What if your cousins weren’t coming back? What was happening? Sound didn’t carry well in the snow. After ten minutes of looking at the other men and the darkening sky, you cleared your throat and said, “I’ll just look. To see what’s happening.”

  You climbed the ridge and looked off into empty pine forest. Your cousins’ trail was clear. You walked quickly, breaking through the snow at each step, already feeling too hot in your chain mail. Up ahead you heard what might be a man’s grunt—how far off? You started to jog, then ran to a cleared space, where your cousins were fighting four men.

  They stood, swords drawn, with their backs to a tree. Berik, the fair one, was on one knee, with no wound showing but drops of blood in the snow around him. Four men were fanned out in front of them. They were dark-skinned, wearing embroidered cloaks. Southerners? Two held spears with bronze heads; one had a broad, short sword of old and discolored metal. One had a proper heavy longsword. It seemed silly, four against two, the kind of fight you’d fall into while goofing around at the end of arms practice. You weren’t supposed to win, just have fun battling the odds.

  No one looked at you. Eran rushed the swordsman on his extreme left, trying to push him away from the others. Berik turned to watch, and a man put a spear into him, soundlessly, once and then twice to be sure. Metal was banging against metal. You stepped forward and lunged at the spearman’s neck with your sword. It went right in and stuck there. It was like a trick, a sword through a man’s neck, made more absurd by the way the man stuck out his arms and looked around. You wanted to laugh, but another man with a sword ran at you and tackled you. You landed on your back, then twisted to the top, the way you used to wrestle your brothers, except this was a stranger, heavy and stinking of sweat and smoke and thrashing under you, biting unfairly as your brothers never would, and that was the enraging thing. You shifted your weight and pinned the man’s sword arm with your left hand and got your right forearm stuck under the man’s chin and pushed with all your strength for long, long seconds, long after you would have let up in a play fight. You held it there until your opponent stopped moving and someone jabbed you rudely in the small of your armored back.

  You rolled to your feet with the attacker’s tarnished short sword in your hand. How had it gotten dark so fast? You remembered now how Eran had been calling your name for some time, then he’d stopped and turned into one of the black shapes on the ground.

  Now you felt warm, like you could make the world go in slow motion. The last man was small, thick under his cloak, with wide-set eyes. He was castle-trained but fatally tired, and he knew it. It was almost too easy to knock his blade out of the centerline, slip his guard, and strike him in the temple with the hilt. The thought, involuntary, was that you were killing the third man of your life and no one was watching. You never knew who they were or what started the fight.

  Your father’s men had gone, in which direction you couldn’t tell. It was starting to snow. You sobbed a few times with shock and exhaustion. The strangers’ camp wasn’t that far. You sat in the dark under the firs and watched snow fall, hissing into the coals. Your cousins were freezing solid a hundred yards away. Your mind jumped from one image to the next, Berik dying, the swordsman’s blue eyes, climbing the stairs of the roundhouse in summer, your cousins talking about a peasant girl they’d shared, a girl you’d grown up with.

  You woke up three or four times in the night, terrified, thinking you heard voices, and that was when you realized that what you dreaded most now was your father’s men coming back to find you and take you back to your old life, your coward of a father, and the name of a house that would never rise again. In two weeks, you thought, you could be anywhere.

  I bought Brennan a shield with a griffin on it, crimson on a field of gold.

  Prendar is the only one left. Quick and stealthy, with devastating surprise attacks. Forbidden from wearing metal armor, but bow, dagger, and sword are all permitted.

  You can imagine Prendar’s home as clearly as you can your own. It was a muddy village of three hundred at most. Everyone knew him, everyone knew his mother was gone, and everyone knew his father worked his field during the day and at night sat in his home in the dark like a fucking ghost. He learned his letters from a priest who came through once every two weeks and taught whoever would listen. He knew the long chants that told the history of the world, and he could draw the shape of the entire continent in the dirt, with a dot for where the village was.

  Prendar wore his hair long but the truth was obvious. Elven blood shows, even in a half-blood. It took a stranger to point it out, a traveler, drunk and hateful, who seized him by the hair and dragged him into the street. Prendar jerked away, and was out of the village before anyone had a chance to follow, over a low fence and through an overgrown field to the forest. He wasn’t hurt that badly, just bruises and a bloody nose. He stopped and washed his face. At least he was wearing shoes.

  He had nowhere to go, so he waited in the woods for the priest to pass on his way to the village. The priest had already heard what happened. They talked a long time as they walked together from one league marker to the next. The priest gave Prendar his hat and a bronze coin stamped with a crown on one side and a coiled sea monster on the other. He explained how to find due north using the stars, and made Prendar repeat it back. Prendar thanked the priest and, with no more ceremony than that, he set off walking.

  (None of this has any relation to you, a person with norma
l-looking ears who went to high school and college in good order, who had normal parents and suffered no beatings to speak of. You would not, frankly, have had the guts in a million years to run away, no matter what you told yourself as you lay awake.)

  The intervening years have given Prendar five inches in height and a cloak he can travel in, as well as matching long daggers he’s learned how to use. It’s late in the autumn season, and that long-ago quest was forgotten the first night he spent in a city.

  He was paid prodigiously, but it was his last night in the city-state of Arn. The wars of the Second Age brought him better fortunes. But those wars ended some time ago. He wondered if his mother had survived them or lay dead in an unmarked field. He’d find her one day. Elves lived forever, didn’t they? Maybe he would, too.

  The scarred, muscular man with long hair tied back in a bun and a hunted look around the eyes, a weathered, cord-wrapped sword hilt projecting above one shoulder. An older man, bearded, his cloak stiff with whorls of gold thread. A tall, pale half elf dressed in gray with sandy red hair and a beak of a nose. Like the older man, he wears clothes that were expensive a long time ago.

  I’d never thought of them except as game pieces, as tiles on a map: sword, staff, arrow, dagger. In the new engine, they’re people. Each one stops in the doorway, hesitates, then slowly takes a seat in an unoccupied corner. They’ve seen each other across many battlefields but never before in peacetime, across the scarred wood of a tavern.

  What now? There’s no reason to fight; all those reasons died with the Second Age. The great Four Heroes of the Second Age are now stateless wanderers.

  They’re aware of each other. Lorac, who sits with his bitter ale half drunk, nervously ghosting through ritual gestures with limber hands. Prendar, who fidgets in his seat, well into his second tankard. He flirts with a bar maid, and plucks a white flower from her hair. Brennan, who sits completely still, staring straight ahead, one finger resting on the hilt of the sword leaning against the bench.