In his fury, Rick tried to grab his friend by the shirtfront. He felt only the electric buzz of Favian’s presence as his hand somehow slipped past him. In an instant, Favian had flashed away across the room so that the portal floated and glowed between them.
“Tell me!” Rick shouted in rage and frustration.
“There’s nothing you can do!” the blue man cried out.
“You’re lying!” Rick yelled again, taking a step after him. “Tell the truth! She’s still here! I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to help her!”
Favian’s voice grew high and thin with strain. “She doesn’t want your help! She doesn’t want you to see her!”
“I don’t care. Take me to her.”
“She . . .”
“I don’t care! Take me!”
The two men stared at each other across the portal. Favian was the weaker personality. He turned away first. He looked down at the floor.
“You won’t like what you see.”
Even Rick was startled by the strangled sound of his own voice. “Take me to her!”
Wearily, sadly, Favian nodded.
“All right,” he said. “Come on.”
17. POOL
THEY WENT BACK out of the cottage and through the woods, Favian flashing ahead and Rick jogging after. Rick’s eyes were now hot and bright with fear and determination: fear of what he was going to see; determination to do something about it. Nothing would stop him from helping Mariel. Not even Mariel herself.
The woods seemed to grow darker around them as they traveled. The leaves above grew thicker, blocking out the buttery light of the sky. The tree trunks became more twisted and the tortuous branches interlocked in a grim weave-work that seemed to press in on them from every side. They were in what appeared to be a haunted forest now, a place more indigo than aquamarine, a tangle of hidden corridors draped in a permanent night full of shadows.
Here Favian finally came to a stop. Standing straight, full of fresh energy, his shifting blue form was bright in the gloom. He watched as Rick approached. He said nothing. He simply lifted his hand; pointed.
Rick, catching up to him where he stood, followed the gesture. He saw a small hollow: a clearing at the center of low, dead, interlacing trees. A strange sickly mist spread over the space.
And through the mist, Rick saw a dark pool of water.
He felt something inside him grow heavy and afraid. Water was Mariel’s element. She lived in it, moved in it. It formed her and carried her from place to place. But until now, she had always occupied the Realm’s vital, silver, mercurial lakes. She had been silver, flashing and mercurial herself. But this—this pool—the water here—was thick and brackish. There was still a metallic sheen to it, but it was as if the metal had become oily and rusted.
What was worse—much worse—was that as Rick stood there staring at the pool, as he stood trying to work up the courage to go near it, a voice seemed to bubble up out of its depths, a sound that was half a whisper and half a cry. The voice broke through the water’s surface and spread through the mist and, like the mist, hung in the air all around him. The hollow was filled with its mournful noise.
Rick could not make out any words. But Favian apparently understood. The blue man flinched and drew back from the edge of the clearing. His anxious eyes grew even more anxious and he called out, “He made me do it! He made me bring him here! He wouldn’t stay away.”
“Mariel?” said Rick, breathless.
He stepped forward into the hollow. Dead leaves, some blue, some red, some golden, crunched beneath his sneakers.
The sorrowful noise continued to rise from the pool. It continued to spread out through the mist, growing thinner and thinner, dimmer and dimmer. Then, suddenly, like an elastic band pulled to its limits, it snapped back into itself, coming together in a faint echo of Mariel’s rich, resonant, musical voice.
“Stay away!” she moaned.
But Rick didn’t even pause. He kept moving into the hollow, moving toward the pool. “I’m here to help you, Mariel,” he said. “I’ve brought energy. Like I did before.”
The sound boiled out of the water again, spread through the mist again, and again it snapped together so that she answered him like an echo: “Stay away!”
Her melancholy tone made Rick hesitate, but only for a second. Then he told her, “I won’t,” and he kept walking forward.
Now he was deep in the mist. It surrounded him. He felt its clammy cold clinging to his skin. More than that: He felt her—Mariel—as if she were inside the haze itself, as if she were part of it. He felt dampness clinging to him as if it were her fingers trying to hold him, trying to draw him back from the edge of the pond.
Her voice, like the mist, seemed to be everywhere. “I don’t want you here, Rick.”
“You helped me,” he insisted, still coming forward. “So many times. The sword you gave me. The armor. The things you told me about the Realm. I’d be dead if it weren’t for you, Mariel.”
“Then do what I tell you. Stay away.”
“I won’t. You helped me and now I’m going to help you. Let me help you, Mariel.”
“No!” cried the mist, and it clung to him but it didn’t have the strength to hold him back. He reached the edge of the water. The mist seemed to quiver with Mariel’s anguished cry: “Please!”
“Let me help you.”
“Please! No! Don’t look at me!”
“I will.”
And he did. He peered into the brackish depths of the pool and he saw her there.
For two months he had been thinking about her, even dreaming about her. For two months her image had been in his mind. Her high, noble, warrior beauty. The grace of her silver form, her steadying wisdom and the gentleness in her eyes. Lying in his bed at night, he had imagined her floating in the dark above him. He had asked himself: Who was she? What was she? Did he love her? Could he?
Two months. It was only two months since he had seen her last.
And this was what she had become.
Her image floated like a corpse in the water, just beneath the murky surface. It dissolved in passing ripples and re-formed as the pond grew still. It was the image of an old woman—no, an ancient hag. Mariel had been drained not only of her youthful beauty, but of every vestige of vitality. She was like a withered plant; a near-dead thing. Her high cheeks had caved in on themselves, and so had her full figure. Her once-flowing hair hung like weeds around the shriveled remnants of her features. Her arms were knotted twigs and her fingers trembled, shimmering. Her eyes—once noble and compassionate—were now full of nothing but death and anguish.
Rick had tried to prepare himself for what he would see. He had known it was going to be bad. But nothing could have readied him for this. One look at her and he caught his breath and had to turn away. He lifted his eyes to the tangled branches that blocked out the yellow sky above him.
Seeing his reaction to her, Mariel cried out in pain. Her wail became the mist and the mist echoed with pain all around him.
Rick’s weakness lasted only a moment, though. He recovered quickly. He marshaled his strength—his strength and his courage both—and lowered his eyes to her again and looked at her directly.
“Just let me die!” she cried up to him out of the depths of the pool.
“No,” he said quietly. “Never.”
“I’m so horrible! I can’t live like this. Look—look at what’s happened to me! I’m horrible. Look.”
He did look. He refused to remove his gaze from her again. “You’ll never be horrible,” he told her. “Not to me.” Only after he had forced himself to say this—for her sake—did he realize it was also true. His first reaction—his dismay—was over, and he was only sad for her now; sad for her and for himself as well; for what he’d lost; for what he might now lose forever. But then, he told himself, this was the way things were, whether here in the Realm or back in RL. Beauty withered. People died. You just had to remember: withered—even dead—they were still w
ho they were—always.
She was still Mariel, even now.
This time, when he put his hand on the hilt of his sword, when her energy ran up into him, it was not the majestic force it had been before. Instead, he felt the full flow of her sorrow. It touched him. In a funny way, it made him feel closer to her. She had been so much like a spirit to him before, so queenly and powerful. Now, in her pain—and in her embarrassment at the way she looked—she was more . . . well, real. More human. More like a girl he might know.
He drew the sword.
“Save your energy,” the mist whispered around him. “Save it for Favian. You can’t help me anymore.”
He didn’t even bother to answer her. Rick’s hot nature may have given him a quick temper, but it also made him immovable when he set his mind to something: immovably loyal, immovably determined, immovably courageous. He would not turn away from Mariel again.
“Give me your hand,” he said gently.
“Let me alone, Rick.”
He knelt down by the side of the pool. “Give me your hand.”
He took the broken blade and pressed the point against his palm again, against the old wound that had barely healed.
“Don’t . . .,” said Mariel through the mist.
But he ignored her. He reopened his palm. The red energy began pulsing out of him.
“Your hand,” he said. “Quickly.”
And he thrust his own glowing hand into the pool.
The water was cold and not just cold, but deathly chill, as if the chill of Mariel’s fading life had poisoned it. The red energy in Rick’s palm flashed with his pulse and the water glowed with the flash and grew dark then glowed again. With each new beat, Mariel’s aged, tormented face turned bloodred then sank away into the watery shadows.
“Give me your hand,” Rick insisted. “Don’t let this go to waste.”
Slowly, and with an obvious effort, she lifted one dwindled arm. Rick felt her twig-like fingers intertwine with his. Then their hands were together and she gasped as the energy pulsed out of him and into her.
Rick also felt something spreading through him—something good—some warmth and gladness. What he saw as he gazed down into the pool seemed to him almost like a miracle. With each beat of his heart, with each fresh pulse of energy out of his palm and into hers, Mariel’s youth and beauty and majesty returned to her. Her hair grew lush, her cheeks grew high and proud again, her figure re-formed into the figure of a young woman. Within moments she was again as he remembered her. And when the last of the energy had flowed out of him, he found a strong hand entwined with his own. Even the pool’s color had changed. The murky water had cleared and become silvery so that he could barely make Mariel out through his own reflection.
Then suddenly, with a prismatic splash, she blossomed up out of the depths and hung in the air before him, silver and tall and graceful and powerful once again.
For another moment, she kept his hand in hers. Still kneeling on the ground, he lifted his eyes to look up at her. Everything inside him and all around him seemed suspended, as if time held still. She was so beautiful.
She released him. Her voice did not dissipate in the mist anymore. It was as it had been: resonant and flowing like echoed music.
“You should have left me, Rick,” she told him gently. “You should have stayed away as I told you to.”
He shook his head. “That’s just not happening,” he said. “Not now. Not ever. Just not; it’s not.”
She tried not to smile down at him, but she did. “Well, thank you then.”
Her smile made his heart swell. He sheathed the sword in his belt. He rose to his feet.
Mariel drew a breath, a fresh breath. Rising above the pond, she turned her majestic head and looked across the hollow to where Favian stood, watching. The mist all around them was dissipating. The air was clearing. Favian nodded to her. She nodded back.
She forced her smile away. She looked down at Rick, serious.
“You’d better come with us at once,” she said. “There’s not much time. And there’s something you have to see.”
18. WARCRAFT
A MOMENT LATER, she was gone. Where Mariel had been, there was only a sparkling silver shower shot through with rainbows. Her form had spilled back down into the pool.
For the first time Rick noticed that there was a small stream trickling away beneath the hollow’s fallen leaves. As he watched it, the stream rose and burbled and frothed—and he knew that Mariel was flowing into it. Before Rick could even take a step to follow her, Favian flashed after her. Rick followed him.
They moved through the forest swiftly. The stream grew broader and bigger up ahead. Its silver water rippled and lathered wherever Mariel passed through. Favian was right behind her, a blue glow streaking from place to place. And then came Rick, racing over the forest duff, the leaves crunching under his sneakers as he dodged between the green-brown trunks of trees.
The three soon emerged from the haunted darkness in which Mariel had been hiding herself. They came back into the bluer, brighter woods. Within minutes, the dense forest was thinning out around them. Rick looked ahead and saw the yellow sky appear through the thinning branches.
Another minute and they broke out of the forest completely. Rick jogged over a brief stretch of red grass and then pulled up short as he came to a sudden cliff, a broad ridge made entirely of quartz-like stone that glittered and flashed in the yellow light. The stream, almost a river now, poured over the ledge and tumbled down in a roaring waterfall. The quartz sparkled beneath the swift flow.
Beyond the ridge a broad vista spread to the far horizon: a vast plain of scarlet grass crisscrossed by winding quartz roads twinkling in the light. All the roads led to one place: the soaring skyscrapers, spires, and domes of the Golden City. They rose darkly against the yellow sky, surprisingly close.
At the edge of the cliff, just where the silver water frothed and roared over the ridge, Mariel appeared again. She bubbled up out of the raucous flow. She hovered in the air, her silver substance catching all the colors around her, the blue of the forest at her back, the glitter of the quartz beneath her, the yellow of the sky above, the scarlet of the plain beyond.
As Rick looked up at her, entranced—joyful that he had raised her from near death—she made a graceful gesture with one watery hand, sweeping it out toward the distance.
Rick thought she was pointing at the city skyline.
“Right, I know,” he said. “You told me last time. The Golden City—it’s the heart of this place and its battery—and it’s full of the ghosts and horrors of Kurodar’s imagination—and I’m going to have to destroy it if I want to bring the MindWar to an end. See, I was paying attention.”
“And it’s all true, Rick,” said Mariel—and Rick could have sworn he caught a new note in her voice, a thrilling new tone of tenderness. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on his part. “But that’s not what I want to show you,” she went on. “Before you can enter the Golden City, before you can do anything else, you’re going to have to destroy Kurodar’s new machine. And you’re going to have to do it soon, before he uses it to unleash a fresh attack on Real Life.”
Rick’s eyes followed her gesture again. But what was she pointing at? There was nothing there. Nothing but the red plain, the Golden City, the yellow sky. He glanced up at her again.
“I don’t see any new machine,” he said.
“Wait,” said Mariel, her voice an echoing music. “It crosses this place every two hours to take in fresh energy and supplies. It’ll be here any minute now. Watch.”
Rick’s gaze lingered on her beautiful face another moment—and he could tell she knew he was looking at her, though she didn’t glance down at him. Finally, he drew his eyes away and turned in the direction she was pointing.
A quiet second passed, then another. Then it began.
He felt it before he saw it. There was a drop in the temperature. The air turned chill—that sort of chill that eats into
you, that makes your very bones go cold. And more than that. The cold air began to snap and shimmer. Rick’s hair stiffened on his head, as if electricity were going through him.
Next, the sky began to change. Lavender cloud-like patches grew out of its yellow depths. They billowed and grew and joined together, thickening into the deep murky texture of thunderheads. The color drained out of everything below. Red grass, blue forests, sparkling quartz roads, and mountains and the amber sky all sank into one sickly greenish-purple gloom. A wind rose, stirring the plain, swirling over the ridge, passing across Rick’s skin and making him shiver as the goose bumps came out.
The wind, the cold, the electric shimmer, the gathering dark: Rick tensed as he felt the thing coming. It was almost here. Almost . . .
A moment later it began to rumble up over the edge of the world. Vast—it was unimaginably vast. The whole Realm muttered and shook and purple lightning flashed through the darkness as it kept rising and rising until it seemed it would blot out the sky completely.
It was a thing of nightmares. At its core, there was a black oblong mothership. It spread from one end of the horizon to the other. Orange and blue lights flashed and flickered all across it, like window-glow from a distant city. And surrounding the disk, overtopping it, blending into it, so that they seemed to be one thing, there was . . . he couldn’t name it: some enormous beast, its tentacles waving and undulating over half the world below. It was like an octopus, only its face was malevolent and repulsively human: a man’s face of enormous proportions that, like the tentacles, seemed inseparable from the black ship itself. Rick wasn’t sure why, but the face seemed familiar to him somehow. Its skin had a greenish tinge, blotted with patches of dripping red. And its eyes—that was the worst of it, its eyes . . . they were huge and burning with murderous fury. And he had seen them somewhere before.
Something rose into Rick’s throat. He felt nauseous and weak at the sight of this living battleship. He was supposed to get onto that? Destroy that? How, exactly? The thing was as big as the city beneath it; it was bigger! Almost as big as the digital heavens.
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