Finally, they crested the ridge to find they had at last reached the summit.
“Blood and thunder, what’s that?” Gunnar’s exclamation was soon followed by gasps from the others. Then it was Cindella’s turn to scramble up to the wide shelf of rock.
Ahead of them was a large valley, contained within a mountain range on the far horizon and a wine-dark sea to their right. In the center of the valley was a major city built in a circular design, with massive black birds flying slowly above it. A city? Not exactly. After a moment’s search through her magic bag, Cindella found the Eyes of the Eagle and put them on.
Once he was sure of what he was seeing, Erik had Cindella remove the lenses. “It’s an army,” he pronounced. “Those birds are airplanes.”
“Yep.” Ghost was looking through her binoculars. “And see where all those roads are converging? That’s a huge plaza and it has a portal at the center of it.”
Athena, who had sat down with her arms around her knees to recover from the climb, shook her head in disbelief, causing her long black hair to sway from side to side. “An army? That big?”
“Here.” Ghost gave Athena the binoculars before looking at Cindella and blowing her breath out heavily, as if to say, Now that’s a challenge.
“Lug-a-bug! Still, at least we know where the last portal is.”
“Erik.” Gunnar was pointing toward the far mountains. “What do you make of that?”
“What?”
“The moon.”
They could now see all of the sky ahead that had previously been blocked from view by the hill. Just above the jagged crests of the far horizon was a nearly full silver disc.
“Yeah?”
“Look up there.” Gunnar was now pointing directly above them, to where the pale crescent of a larger moon could be seen in the azure sky.
Two moons. A shiver ran through Erik’s body, sufficiently strong to partly bring his senses back to his body on New Earth. Two moons, and in the exact proportions they should be: Sylvania and Aridia. This was why the world had felt familiar.
A rush of memories avalanched through his thoughts; nearly ten years of memories, all the way from when he had first placed a helmet on his head and clipped up to Epic. At the age of seven, his mum, Freya, had met him in the game and helped him navigate his first character through the city of Newhaven. They had gone to the arena so that Erik could learn how to fight. Almost every day thereafter he had spent some time in Epic.
At first it had been interesting enough, but after two or three years of grinding away at getting pennies for his characters, it had become a chore, worse than any on the farm. His attitude toward Epic had changed again, at the end, after he had created Cindella. The game had become a thrilling world once more, full of possibilities that no one alive had been aware of, including the awakening to consciousness of the game itself. And one feature of the landscape of Epic that you never fully became used to was that the world had two moons.
“Erik?” asked Ghost. “What’s the matter?”
“We’re in Epic,” Erik whispered, looking slowly around in amazement. “It’s another Epic.”
“How can that be?” asked Ghost. “I thought you destroyed Epic.”
“You destroyed Epic?” Jodocus sounded impressed.
“I finished the ultimate quest, and that had the effect of ending the game. But this isn’t the same Epic. A second set of colonists must have also chosen to play Epic and started a new version.”
“It makes sense,” mused Athena. “Why bother to put all the work into creating a new world if you can run an old one again. But you know what this means, Ghost?”
“What?”
“There could be two Sagas.”
“Another version where the Dark Queen still rules, perhaps.” Ghost did not sound happy at the thought.
“Is that what’s in store for us beyond the portal?” said Athena. “It kind of fits. If the Dark Queen had found a way to move from world to world, she’d conquer them and build armies like these.”
“Are you sure this is another Epic?” asked Jodocus. “It comes as a surprise to me that the same game was set up twice.”
“That’s where Newhaven should be.” Gunnar pointed to the vast army sprawled out below them. “And all those fields we walked through. They’ve cut down the forest, cleared out the wood elves, and ploughed the land.”
“You’re right, Gunnar,” said Erik. “I should have seen it myself. I knew there was something familiar about this world. Something about the color of it. What a transformation, though. They’ve left nothing.”
“Nothing,” echoed Gunnar.
“Except, I wonder . . .” Cindella pulled her glove off to let the Ring of True Seeing illuminate the world around her. “I should have done this hours ago.”
The immediate landscape around him was suddenly rich with life. The apparently bare stone hilltop concealed a vibrant collection of plants, from dull mosses creeping out from dark crevasses between stones, to hardy wildflowers bowing their pastel-colored heads to the sea breeze. And on the flora crawled flies, beetles, and spiders. Seabirds had built nests in the lees of the rocks, abandoned now until the spring. Tiny land birds hopped along the slopes of the hill, searching for seeds, berries, and insects. Below Cindella, back the way they had come, the view was subtly altered and he could tell from the slight variation in the shadows now lengthening over the grain tops that roads and buildings had once been there.
Further along the ridge was what Cindella had been looking for. A silvery cord, gently oscillating, came out of the distant valley, snaked its way up the hill, and veered away from them toward the sea.
“Follow me.”
Athena and Ghost looked at Cindella with expressions of curiosity.
“They’ve destroyed everything on the material plane; turned it all into farms or that massive barracks. But Epic had an ethereal plane, too. It was kind of like a web of extra dimensions lying on top of the world. And not just the world; there are ethereal paths that even go up to the moons. I can see an ethereal path now, not too far away, and if we follow it we should come to whole clusters of them.”
“Yeah? Then what?” Athena got up, to show that despite the skepticism in her voice, she was willing to follow Cindella.
“Then I’m not sure, but if we can use the ethereal paths, we might be able to get to the portal unseen.”
“Class! All right. Come on then.”
Up and down they walked and climbed, following Cindella’s lead, moving just below the crest of the hill until they came close to the sea. The cliffs here were severe. But marking out a half circle about a hundred meters’ radius from the drop were the ruined remains of an old hill fort, its stone walls mostly piles of rubble. The shining cord went over the wall and after Cindella had leaped up to follow it, she saw that it only traveled another twenty meters or so before stopping, swaying in the air like the end of a silver rope.
“Oh. It terminates here.”
“What does that mean?” Ghost had climbed up the ruined wall to stand beside Cindella.
“I don’t know for sure. It’s like the start or finish of a path. This must have been an important place once. Do you know anything about it, Gunnar?”
The handsome trooper shook his head. “My Epic character was never powerful enough to access the ethereal plane.”
“Want to come up and see inside?” Cindella leaned down and offered her hand to help pull Gunnar up. Athena, however, sat at the base of the wall. She glanced up at Erik.
“I’ll wait until you’ve figured it out. I’m exhausted.”
The sun had set, and although there was still a little color in the sky, the bright silver thread—seen with the aid of the magic ring—burnished the stones and grass around it, turning them a metallic gray.
“Well, we would normally need a witch to cast a spell for us, but Cindella has a Potion of Ethereal Travel. If we stand in a chain, holding hands, we can all cross to the ethereal realm together.”<
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Ghost looked resolute. “And we will be invisible to the army, right?”
“Invisible to anything that cannot see into the ethereal plane, which seems to be the case for our opponents. But . . .”
“But . . .” Athena, deep in shadow, gestured for him to continue.
“But there are Epic creatures that travel these paths, too. Monsters. Although all the farms we’ve walked through seem to have been stripped of any threatening creatures, we can’t assume the same for the ethereal plane.”
“No,” Gunnar agreed. “And anything that can travel in the ethereal plane will be very powerful, very dangerous.”
“Like what?”
Cindella turned to Ghost. “It’s a dark and magic realm. It’s a place of ghosts, of wicked fairies, of hunters that ride nightmares. At special times, and in certain rare places—like ancient graves, or this hill fort, I’d guess—these creatures of the ethereal plane can cross over to the material plane, and if you have the right spells or items, you can cross over to them.”
Seeing that their faces, so cheerful when they greeted him, had become solemn, Erik put some enthusiasm into his voice. “Look, there’s a very good chance that as we are just traveling down to the valley, we’ll get there before any ethereal creature notices us.”
“Good.” Ghost nodded. “And where exactly are we going then?”
“We’ll have to follow the path and see what our choices are. If it’s safe, I’ll bring us out at the portal. If not, we might just come back here after seeing what lies farther down the path.”
“All right,” said Ghost. “Let’s give it a try. After all, we’re not going to be able to sneak through that army any other way.”
Everyone was up now, packing their kits, and after helping Athena over the wall, they gathered in a circle around a large stone slab—sea and cliff edge behind them, stone wall in front, and the early evening stars far above.
Chapter 26
SING AGAIN, SIREN
“All set?” Cindella was holding Gunnar’s hand and Erik had her lean forward to see down the line and check that everyone else was joined up: Gunnar to Athena, Athena to Jodocus, and Jodocus to Ghost. A Potion of Ethereal Travel was in Cindella’s left hand. She raised it to her mouth and the metallic liquid emptied from the crystal bottle. “Here goes.”
As Erik looked about for signs of change, the windswept hill fort appeared as bleak as ever; bleaker, in fact, with the sighing waves below hidden by night and the sky above black but for the faint glimmering of stars. All at once, though, they were no longer standing but floating, and the cold emptiness of the night had been replaced by an opalescent luminosity. The ground began to fade and seemed as soft and malleable as a sheet of cotton, and the less substantial the earth, the more real became the silvery cord that Erik had followed along the ridge of hills earlier in the day. It expanded to become a grainy path, about two meters wide, that glittered and shone as though made of moonlight. The path was firm under Cindella’s boot, and she let go of Gunnar’s hand to set off on it. After a moment’s hesitation, everyone dropped their hands and followed her.
There was no wind anymore, or at least not enough to stir the ends of Cindella’s long red hair. Nor was there any sound from the restless sea. All Erik could hear were the noises of their group walking along the silver pathway: the regular but sharp clip of their feet upon the hard ground and a soft rustle of clothes and bags. On either side of them the view was twisting, as though the horizon was melting. The path, however, remained sharply in focus.
Although he had assured them that a short journey would most likely be safe, Erik kept everyone moving forward at a swift pace. As Gunnar said, any creature they encountered in such a region would be very dangerous.
Already, the path meandered enough that Erik only had a rough idea of the direction he needed to go to reach the portal. He stopped in confusion at the first junction they came to. It was a crossroads and any of the three options might be the right one to take. One problem was that the world beyond the silver walkways was an eerie and ghostly one that was twisting and turning even while everyone stood still. The other difficulty was distance; it seemed to Erik that at times they had crossed entire hills with one step and they could already have passed the great army in the valley.
Apart from Erik’s own brief experience in the Ethereal Tower of Nightmare, no one he knew of had traveled the ethereal paths of Epic and he doubted that anyone had ever done so. When your family’s income and status depended on the survival of your character, it was reckless to explore anywhere for fun, let alone the dangerous ethereal realm.
Having chosen a route that seemed to be heading in the right direction, Cindella led the others on down the silver path. With every step, though, the edge of a forest seemed to draw closer, until their route was a tunnel through gnarled and oddly distorted tree trunks, whose branches reached up as if making gestures of supplication.
“Creepy,” muttered Athena, but no one else spoke. Perhaps, like Erik, they felt that in the darkness between the trees there were malevolent creatures and that it was best not to disturb them.
Several more strides brought them to a clearing where moonlight picked out a woman sitting on the edge of a well. She was bent forward over a washing board, dark and shining hair covering her face and shoulders. Cindella halted.
“Oh dear,” Erik whispered.
“What is it?” Jodocus was immediately behind him.
“I’m not sure, but let’s go back.”
“We can’t.”
Erik turned to see that the path behind them had been taken over completely by the menacing trees.
“This is terrible,” he said aloud.
“She knows we are here, doesn’t she?” Ghost had come up alongside Cindella. Erik looked again at the woman and although she seemed to be concentrating on her washing board, scrubbing hard at a leather tunic, he felt that she was staring at him, and hungering for him. It was like looking into the eyes of a jaguar.
“It might be wise to summon a powerful elemental,” suggested Erik.
“If I can. Let me try with a small one first.” Jodocus raised his sturdy left arm and his cloak fell back to reveal his tattoos. “Malisobhin, come forth and serve me.”
A light spray of blood burst from the elementalist’s flesh and for a moment an earthen figure stepped in front of them. But it faltered and crumbled into a pile of dirt that quickly turned silver and sank into the ground. Erik saw the ethereal creature twitch at the edge of his vision.
“I’m sorry. I’m of no use to you in this realm. There are no elements here from which my servants can draw the sustenance they need to maintain their forms.”
“Then let’s see if our Higgs pistols work.” But as Ghost drew her gun, the creature moved into action. Something flashed across the space between them, and Ghost was jerked off her feet, her shots flying wildly in the air. Then Ghost was gone. It took far too long for Erik to find out where and understand why. The weapon that the creature had thrown was a silver comb, which had caught Ghost’s dreadlocks and dragged her backward into a tree whose branches had immediately whipped around its prisoner.
Cindella drew her swords and sprang at the ghostly woman, but Erik felt he was probably too late, for the creature had tipped her head back, her hair parting like a black wave sliding from a pale boulder to reveal her face. She had no eyes or nose, only a round hole from which a wild, undulating cry was gathering volume.
“Banshee! Cover your ears!” Erik cried as he lunged at the monster. Already the magic in the creature’s voice was affecting Cindella.
Very rarely when playing Epic you experienced “lag.” Your character would freeze for a moment, then, as you synchronized with the game once more, you’d catch up as if in fast-forward and all the commands you’d issued while stuck would be acted on at once. The effect of the banshee’s keen was to induce a similar interruption in Erik’s control over Cindella.
Everything stopped. Then it rush
ed ahead. Then stopped. By the time Cindella’s blades slashed at the banshee, the evil spirit had skipped away and her shriek was louder, an agonizing screech in his ears. Even when Cindella froze again, the awful sound continued.
Gunnar was trying to shoot the banshee with his pistol, but he, too, was lagging badly. His shots came in bursts and always too late to find their target.
The sound was so awful now—a venomous roar—that Erik’s hands automatically reached toward the unclip commands and it took all his willpower to stay in the game, steering Cindella in a hopeless chase after the howling creature.
Then, suddenly, it was over, although a ringing sound continued to run painfully through his head. The banshee had been silenced. Erik caught up with events after Cindella unfroze, when another sudden rush of motion took place in which Athena ran up to the banshee and shot her in the mouth at close range. The creature jerked back and was now lying on the ground, her long, glittering hair strewn across her white dress.
“How did you resist her magic?” Erik asked Athena.
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