“Me? Dangerous?”
“You’ll get more dangerous as you progress along the Path of Music. One day you might realize that seduction is easy if you set aside your honor. I just wanted to let you know that your self-control hasn’t gone unnoticed or unappreciated.”
Gary tested the waters. “Maybe, to be safe, I should cross over to the Path of Arcana,” he said with a lopsided smile.
Sira stiffened. “Please don’t joke about that. I was almost never born because of wizards. My great grandfather died days after conceiving my grandmother. Wizards’ work. Roasted alive like a pitch-soaked torch. You’ve shown willpower, sure. But I’d take a boorish, groping Gary over a mind-raping, pyromaniac demonologist if you’re going to fall from that pedestal I just put you on.”
Gary swallowed. “Duly noted.” For a moment, he hoped for an attack to break the awkward silence that followed.
Then, with Sira’s weight heavy on his shoulder, Gary realized that he was the only one awake. He jostled the priestess as her snores threatened to summon bears from their hibernation.
A voice that reverberated through the forest caught Gary’s full attention. “Worry not. Their slumber is complete. I came in response to a curiously bold summons, Gary Burns.”
32
The figure that strode among the trees toward Gary was easily nine feet tall, completely human looking, and bare chested. It had the sort of physique that sculptors used to portray perfection of body, so idealized as to appear unattainable. Bathed in back-lit golden radiance, the god in mortal guise entered the campsite and trod among the slumbering mortals without leaving any footprints.
“I have given you your name, Gary Burns,” the god stated. Though his mouth moved, the sound of his voice came from every direction. “Now tell me mine.”
The omnipresence of voice alone wasn’t enough to awe Gary. He’d come from a world of surround sound and home theater systems with enough subwoofer kick to shake his ribs. He’d been to IMAX movies. This being in front of him was almost too unreal to intimidate.
As for the question, Gary knew it was meant as a test. But if that was the case, this god was going to have to do better. “You’re Makoy, god of all things noble, true, and honorable,” he replied. “I know you by the symbol on your amulet and the golden hue of your halo of divine radiance. May I presume that my message arrived via Randal Vintner?”
Makoy placed his fists on his hips. “The wizard’s claim was bold, as I have already stated. He came before my judgment as one unjustly kept below on Pellar. Normally, I would have allowed him to discharge his duty and ignored your entreaty. You hold no obligation over me. And yet…”
“Curiosity,” Gary said simply.
“Indeed,” Makoy replied. “The name Gary Burns is so obscure that few other than the gods have ever heard it whispered—at least until you took it as your own. Do you know that it is the name of the being that brought this world from the nothingness into the existence you see before you?”
“Yeah,” Gary replied. “That’s me.”
Makoy shook his head. “I do not understand. You are under no magical delusion, and your mortal mind appears intact. I grant to my paladins a fraction of my power to discern truth from lie. No mortal voice might slip a falsehood past my ear. I hear truth beneath lies, even the innocuous nothings that mortal society demands out of misguided politeness. I hear no falsehood in your words, and yet I still cannot believe them. Convince me that this universe is your creation, or I must spirit you away as an apostate to the true Gary Burns, lest he smite all of creation back to nothingness at his whim.”
“First off, I wouldn’t do that,” Gary said. “Second, give me a minute to think. Convince you… OK. How’s this. I know that Wegma tried to tempt you into an affair to make Jorambo jealous. You reported her actions, and the pair has been at odds ever since.”
“Gossip falls to mortal ears,” Makoy replied with a shake of his head. “You speak truth but nothing that couldn’t have reached mortal ears.”
Gary scowled. So, remembering all the Silmarillion-grade mythology he’d cooked up wasn’t going to be enough. Time to see how much Makoy knew. He climbed top his log seat to stand a hair closer to the god’s towering height. “I can see the whole Path of Power. Name a point along the nine rings.”
“Very well, mortal,” Makoy said. “But my humor has a finite end. Parlor tricks will have their limit. Name the first power on the ninth ring of the Path of Savagery.”
“Endless Rage,” Gary replied without hesitation. “No fatigue when a rage ends. Raging gives +4 To Hit and +12 Damage. It comes along with 1d12 hit points, a full +1 To Hit, and 4 skill points.”
The god fixed his eyes on Gary with suspicion. “Those terms. You should only have a vague notion of them. It was the will of Gary Burns that mortals not reduce their lives to numbers like a ledger column and lead lives as their senses showed them.”
“Well, that’s not working out great for me at the moment since my friends are oblivious to their real identities,” Gary said, scanning the ground where his sleeping companions lay. “Not that I dislike them in character, but I could be having a lot more fun if they remembered who they are.”
“If you are truly Gary Burns who created the cosmos and set it to motion at his whim, then simply will their minds to open.”
Gary had never considered that it might be that easy. He pursed his lips and stared. Remember… remember… remember, you dumbasses. You’re not really your characters. Don’t prove those nutjobs right that RPGs would make you lose all sense of reality. Darryl, you’re a CPA who drives a twenty-year-old Volvo, not a paladin. Kim, you work in human resources and earn money on the side reviewing PC games. Katie, you’re a part-time receptionist with a master’s degree and the cutest baby in the world. Marty, you’re my best friend and the only one who doesn’t treat me like a loser for being a college dropout. Zane, you…
Not here. Gary remembered that at the last second, just around the time he was realizing that willing stuff to happen just didn’t work.
“I don’t think I have that power while I’m in the world,” Gary said. “But hey, one of my friends is missing. We all should have appeared in the world at the same time, right outside The Uncommon Room in Durrotek. I never wrote how divine knowledge actually works, but is there an equivalent of a surveillance tape you can go back to look at to see if a guy named either Zane Fischer or Aster Hellcrack showed up around the same time?”
Makoy narrowed his eyes a hair. “It is enough that I acknowledge knowing the name. As you ought to be aware, it is against the divine covenant to provide direct aid to a mortal.”
“But you just said—”
“Do not question me!” Makoy boomed. “You may, indeed, be Gary Burns. And you may be merely testing my adherence to the covenant, as is your right. But in your present form, you are mortal, and I am divine. Do not seek to turn my own words against me like a confidence schemer. I will face my judgment from the Game Master for who I truly am.”
Gary held up both hands in apology. “OK. Got it. No helping mortals. Um, but can you maybe give me one piece of information that would theoretically only matter to an actual being from another cosmos?”
Makoy said nothing, merely crossing his arms and waiting.
“I know there’s a whole circular logic trap at work, but is this place really real? Did I actually create Pellar, or is it all just in my head as some overblown hallucination?”
Makoy backed away a step. “If you wished to strike fear into the heart of a god, the earnestness of that question succeeded. I have heard the philosophers bicker for centuries over the nature of the cosmos with no resolution. Fate alone may know the answer, if you do not. For my own part, I must believe that Pellar and the surrounding planes of existence are real. Without that belief, our lives mean nothing. If you wish to return to your own cosmos, Gary Burns, the only means I can imagine is death.”
With that, the god of justice, truth, and honor vanished.
33
When Gary was finally able to awaken Sira, the priestess was mortified for having fallen asleep on watch. Gary had to promise her that it had only been for a few seconds despite not knowing whether time even passed while Makoy had graced them with his presence.
And there was no sign that the god had been present at all.
Those surfboard-sized feet left no print. The divine light had faded. A whiff of incense and coconut oil had lingered in Gary’s nostrils after the god’s departure but hadn’t lasted long enough to even inquire whether Sira could smell it. The only thing Makoy had left was more questions.
Gary had created this universe. That much he knew to the core of his being. It existed in scribbled notes, spreadsheet printouts, and page upon page of graph paper, much of which had been scanned into PDF for the players to study. But inside the cover of the three-ring binder was one piece of information that the god Makoy had soaked in and taken as literal truth, written in block letters with a signature below like an artist.
Created by: Gary Burns.
He had been the one to outline the indirect interventionist policies of the gods. They held strict rules about how and when divine beings could aid mortals. Signs, portents, and omens had to be suitably vague to skirt those edicts. Clerical powers had to be earned according to the Paths of Power—no playing favorites. The meddling so rampant in the Greek epics of Homer and the Poetic Edda of Norse mythology weren’t meant to occur in Pellar.
Just as with the “no looking at each other’s character sheets” rule Gary had cooked up to focus on role-playing, he regretted tying a hand behind his back.
Makoy had believed him. The god of truth accepted that Gary wasn’t a madman and still wouldn’t lift a finger to help. Maybe he’d have been better off enlisting the aid of Deenee and taking his chances with the pantheon’s equivalent of the asshole genie in the lamp.
The malaise over Gary broke with the dawn.
He didn’t even remember falling asleep, but he woke to the sound of roasting rabbit over the campfire.
“Morning, lumberjack,” Zeeto said, carefully angling a skewered hunk of meat over the fire on the tip of his dagger. “Funny, but I think you snore on key.”
“Oversleeping’s no big deal,” Braeleigh said with a shrug. She was relaxing, propped against the trunk of a tree, hands folded across her belly. “We’ve got all day to get there and not that far to go.”
“Best then we be on our way,” Beldrak said, kicking dirt over the fire. “The diligent tortoise prevail over the indolent hare.”
“Hey!” Zeeto said, coughing over the cloud of dust from the paladin’s efforts to snuff their campfire. “Some of us take time to digest. I was going to have another helping.”
“Doesn’t matter anyway,” Braeleigh said. “We either kill time here or at the temple site. It’s the Temple of Twilight, not the Temple of Whenever You Feel Like Getting There.”
Sira, who had been gathering her pack, paused with a frown. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“According to legend—which for context, is a firsthand account from my grandparents—the temple is only accessible during the time between sunset and the last light in the sky. Not counting the moon or stars, that is.”
Gary bit the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning. He’d never created that legend. The rules about accessing the temple were true enough, but the background was Katie’s doing. He wished he could award roleplaying XP for expanding on his world’s history.
“Methinks I favor an early arrival,” Beldrak said. “Perchance the erstwhile habit of the place hath altered since the days of Braeleigh’s kin.”
“Fine with me,” Sira said. “If the rules have changes, maybe we get an early start. Worst case, we wait there instead.”
Gary didn’t object. The hike was the same either way. A belly full of breakfast or one full of lunch mattered little. The whole world felt different now with the coming and going of a god. Gary had seen minor magics in his time in Pellar thus far, but never until that nocturnal visitation had the place seemed, at once, both more and less real than Earth.
Not considering himself particularly religious, Gary had never felt the presence of the divine before. Makoy had been at once both awe-inspiring and—especially once he departed—disappointing.
The god could have torn Gary to shreds at a whim, frozen him awake in stasis for eternity, or banished him to another plane of existence. Gary knew all this because he’d written up the stats on Makoy and the other gods. The divine should have been incomprehensible, not, in essence, a level 50 multi-path paladin/cleric.
“Gary, for the love of Sevius, hurry up,” Sira shouted back to him. “I know Braeleigh says we’ve got no reason to hurry, but I’m not coming back for you if you get left behind.”
Realizing that he’d been dawdling while he mused, Gary quickened his pace.
Morning wore into afternoon. The party paused for a quick lunch and to refill their water skins in a stream. Then it was off again.
“Shh!” Braeleigh warned, hunkering low along a game trail they’d been following for the past hour. “Get down.”
The forest was uneven, featuring protruding roots and low hillocks that shortened line of sight to under a hundred feet in places. Gary pressed his back against a chest-high rock and slid down until his head was out of sight.
Brush rustled up ahead. A pale blue dress, ragged and plain spun, flashed across the path up ahead. Wearing that dress was a girl who Gary might have guessed at eight or nine years old if he hadn’t spotted the telltale long ears of an elf—or at the very least half-elf.
The girl hadn’t shown any signs of spotting them, bounding across the leaf-strewn forest floor like a startled doe.
Braeleigh wasn’t letting the girl’s presence go without comment. “Hello!” she shouted after the young elf.
The girl spun and held a finger to her lips, barely slowing. “Quiet! He’ll hear you!” she whispered harshly. With that, she took off once more.
Braeleigh had her bow in hand with an arrow nocked in seconds. “We’ve got to help her.”
No… no… no…
Gary didn’t want a fight here. “Maybe we should—”
d20: 1 + (DEX -1) = 1
The Initiative roll flashed across Gary’s consciousness, informing him that it was too late to avoid some form of conflict and adding that his contribution was going to be a long time coming.
Zeeto skulked back along their trail, circling around for a flanking attack. Gary lost sight of the halfling rogue long before he ought to have disappeared behind cover.
Braeleigh hopped a low mound and took cover behind the trunk of a gnarled oak. Sira headed to intercept the girl who’d continued her flight. Beldrak stepped out in plain sight, greatsword bared.
“Show thyself, knave!” the paladin bellowed. “Yonder lass shall either feel thy absence fully or gaze upon thy corpse.”
A string of angry words with a distinctly French accent came as his reply before the speaker switched to the human tongue. “Long way from home, knight. Turn back. Leave us in peace.”
Gary peeked over his boulder.
The elf who’d cursed and spoken looked old—quite a feat for an elf. His wrinkled brow fell into a warning scowl. Dingy gray hair hung in a braid that fell forward over his shoulder. The green, sleeveless tunic he wore appeared home-tailored and had seen better days—possibly better decades. The tip of one long ear was missing, and the other drooped with age. Somehow, for all the elderly trappings of his appearance, the bow held loose in hand managed to menace with the promise of death.
Braeleigh leaped from cover. “Who are you? Why are you chasing that girl?” Her tone held a mixture of wonderment and indignation.
The old elf narrowed one eye. “I am Luin Fernwind, once known as the Rainmaker. And I’m chasing Akota because no one else will do it.”
“Hast thou considered not harrying the lass at all?” Beldrak challenged.
“Of course, not,” Luin said, spitting on the ground. “Bumbling into city-dwelling oafs like you is reason enough why. Now get gone and leave us in peace.”
Gary spotted Zeeto. The halfling had circled around and come up on Luin’s blind side.
Without even looking back, Luin pulled his bowstring forward and fired it over his shoulder. The arrow stuck in the trunk of a tree just inches from the halfling’s nose.
“Zeeto, stop it,” Braeleigh warned. “Rainmaker isn’t here to—”
“I don’t go by that name any longer,” Luin warned. “I only gave it in case it might have held some meaning to you. The more I study that face of yours, though, the more I realize you’re young enough to have forgotten the war.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Braeleigh protested softly. “I lost my parents in the war. I was just twenty-six.”
Luin grunted. “Nearly Akota’s age. No excuse, then. But you walk like a human and speak their tongue without any accent. This isn’t your place any longer.”
“We’re here to find the Temple of Twilight,” Zeeto said. “For an elf.” He yanked the arrow from the tree beside him and hurled it back at the bowman.
“The Château du Crépuscule? No one has been there in ages,” Luin said. “Dark business there. None of you lot look like the sort who take advice to heart, so I won’t bother offering it.” He cupped a hand to his mouth and called into the deep woods. “Akota, the city-dwellers have earned you a reprieve. I’ll hunt and cook dinner. Let’s go.”
With a gentle shush of underbrush, the young elf slipped into view. She brushed hair from her face and used the gesture to hide the curious glance she shot Braeleigh before averting her eyes. Taking Luin by the hand, she allowed the elder elf to lead her away.
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