The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  Tina couldn’t think of a conversation she’d less like to have, but Zen was right. If she was going to demand the best from her people, then she needed to step up too. But while telling SB he was demoted was a lot better than telling him he was being kicked out of the guild, she still didn’t want to do it right now.

  “Can I do it tomorrow?” she asked in a small voice. “It’s almost sunset, and James still hasn’t gotten back to me about the portal to the Deadlands, so it’s not like we’re leaving tonight.”

  Zen rolled her eyes at the obvious dodge, but Tina must have looked really pathetic, because she had mercy. “Fine,” the Ranger said. “But first thing tomorrow.”

  “First thing,” Tina promised, walking back toward her raid, who was staring at Gregory in terror, and with good reason. The king was refreshed and up, swinging his sword merrily with way more energy than someone who’d been fighting raids all afternoon should have. It was clear they were in for yet another ass kicking, but Tina would rather fight the king for the rest of eternity than face what she had to do tomorrow. But tomorrow was tomorrow. Today was today, so Tina wiped the sad expression off her stone face and marched back to her officers to hear what plan they’d come up with this time to try to survive Gregory’s onslaught.

  Chapter 4

  James

  James still hadn’t found SilentBlayde.

  It had been hours since he’d left Leylia’s tent. He’d looked everywhere, dodging jubatus as all of Windy Lake scrambled to prepare for Tina’s plan to assault the Dead Mountain. An assault he was critical to and was supposed to be working on right now.

  “Dammit, Haruto,” James muttered, glaring up at the empty tree where he’d found his friend brooding early this morning. It wasn’t that he didn’t have sympathy for what SB was going through, but it was hard to be compassionate when the elf had brought this entirely on himself for reasons he still refused to talk about. James didn’t have time for this foolishness, but he’d sworn he’d never leave a desperate friend alone again, so off he went to the last place he wanted to go but probably the first he should have checked: Tina’s raid.

  He found his sister standing in the middle of the south road with her entire guild. The king was there as well in full armor with his sword drawn. This frightened him at first—they’d been trying to kill each other a little over a day ago, after all—but his fears vanished when he saw Gregory’s face. The king looked like he was having the time of his life. A moment later, James saw why as the Roughnecks charged in…and promptly got their clocks cleaned by Bastion’s resident five-skull.

  James was forced to leap out of the way as the king sent players flying. One actually landed right in front of him, sprawling in the grass at James’s feet. Fortunately, in a long-overdue stroke of luck, the pained face that looked up at him was exactly the one James needed.

  “Hey, ZeroDarkness,” James said, grabbing a handful of green magics to start weaving a healing spell over the gasping Assassin. “How’s practice going?”

  “How does it look like it’s going?” the jubatus groaned. “We’re so fucking dead.”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” James said encouragingly as he rained healing down on Zero’s head. The Assassin’s look of pain vanished as the bliss of the magical healing hit him, and he rolled back to his feet with a whoop.

  “Thanks for the pick-up,” he said, brushing the dirt off his glowing leather armor. “But what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be making us a portal to the Deadlands or something?”

  “I’m working on it,” James lied. “But I’ve got a favor to ask you first. I’m looking for SB. Have you seen him?”

  ZeroDarkness rolled his cat eyes in exasperation. “Oh yeah, I’ve seen him. Couldn’t miss him. He’s making the whole Lightless Realm even more gloomy than usual.”

  James let out a breath of relief. “Can you get him for me, please?”

  “Sure thing,” the Assassin said, vanishing into the small dark patch of shadow by James’s feet. James barely had time to shudder at the feeling of something invisible sliding past his magic when Zero reappeared with a dirty elf slung over his shoulder.

  Thinking SB had been knocked out, James leaped forward. Then he saw the elf’s blue eyes were open. He wasn’t unconscious; he was just limp, lying in a defeated heap over the feline Assassin’s shoulder.

  “Dude, that was just sad,” ZeroDarkness said, dumping his payload unceremoniously on the ground. “All those times you beat me in duels, and you let me grab you just like that? Get your shit together, Blayde.”

  SilentBlayde said nothing. He just curled up into an even smaller ball on the dusty road. Shaking his head in disgust, Zero turned back to James. “You know him IRL, right? Tell him he needs to shape up, or his problems are only going to get worse, and I’m not talking about Roxxy.”

  That didn’t sound good. “What are you talking about, then?”

  “He knows,” Zero said cryptically. “He’s been eavesdropping from the shadows all afternoon. He knows exactly how much shit he’s in.”

  Before James could ask for more, Zero vanished back into the Lightless Realm, leaving him alone with SilentBlayde, who still hadn’t bothered to get up from where he’d been dumped.

  “Blayde?” James asked tentatively, kneeling beside him. “Can you sit up?”

  “What’s the point?” SB muttered at the ground. “It’s over. Just leave me alone.”

  James sighed in frustration and reached down to grab the elf’s shoulder…only to let go again just as fast when he realized SilentBlayde’s leather armor was still crusty with yesterday’s ash and blood.

  “I’m not going to leave you alone,” he said stubbornly, scrubbing his hand on the grass. “You’re being ridiculous, probably because you’re filthy, you haven’t slept yet, and I’m gonna guess starving too.”

  The elf’s stomach rumbled loudly at that last one, and James smiled. “Come on,” he said, grabbing his friend’s arm. “If you won’t take care of yourself, I guess it’s up to me.”

  SB’s head drooped lower, but he didn’t resist as James hauled him to his feet and started dragging him toward the glittering expanse of Windy Lake. When they got to the edge, he made SB strip and go wash himself off in the warm, clean water. Meanwhile, James used a combination of wind and water magics to scrub the Assassin’s filthy armor. It took two passes to get all the bloodstains out, but he didn’t give the armor back once it was clean. Instead, when Blayde emerged from the water, James handed him a set of normal jubatus clothing from his backpack.

  “Put it on,” he ordered.

  SilentBlayde did as he was told. The rough-woven shirt and trousers were baggy on the underfed elf, but they were comfortable, and the light color protected from the heat. When SB was decent, James grabbed his arm and started pulling him toward the Naturalist’s Lodge.

  The central room was just as busy as it had been when he’d burst in on the meeting earlier. All the clan heads and Gray Fang were still gathered around the table, while a flood of assistants transmitted a constant stream of orders and information. Catching his mentor’s eye, James ducked into one of the wooden lodge’s many side rooms. A few minutes later, Gray Fang joined him, her old yellow eyes watching SB warily.

  “What’s with him?” she asked, nodding at the deathly pale Assassin.

  “Rough night,” James said, settling himself on the rug-strewn floor. “But he’s the best lore guy I know, and I need his help. Can we get him some food?”

  “He’s going to need more than food,” the old Naturalist said, but she snagged an attendant, and soon a plate of meat and gravy-soaked bread was shoved under SilentBlayde’s nose.

  “So why are you here?” Gray Fang asked as SB began to eat mechanically. “I’m guessing it’s not so I can feed your friend lunch.”

  James shook his head. “You’ve heard about Roxxy’s plan to take on the Once King?”

  “The lunacy has been explained to me, yes,” the old cat said
, lashing her gray tail. “I’m dreading to hear your part in it.”

  He smiled at her exasperated tone. “I promised I’d find a way to get the Roughnecks to the Deadlands through the Timeless Tunnels.”

  “I figured it was something like that,” Gray Fang muttered, pulling out her long pipe and lighting it with an ember from the banked brazier in the corner. “You never make small promises, do you, James of Claw Born?”

  James shrugged. “Radical ideas require radical effort, but I’m certain it’s possible. The Bedrock Kings have been the Once King’s enemies since their creation, and we’ve got a stonekin to talk to them with. That’s two points in a line, we just have to make the connection.”

  “You say that like it’s something we can do,” the old cat snapped. “This is insanity. How did you even come up with this idea?”

  He opened his mouth to tell her it was actually Leylia’s idea but caught himself just in time. “It was the only thing everyone could agree on,” he said instead.

  “The only way out of your marriage, you mean,” Gray Fang huffed. “Do you know how hard Rends worked on that deal? If you can’t find a way home, you’ll be sad you missed out.” She paused to take a long draw off her pipe. “At least you were smart enough to get that new Lord Assets to do your dirty work for you. Once again, you’ve somehow managed to avoid all situations that would have shamed our family. You seem to have divine luck at avoiding damaging our honor, which I would love if you weren’t constantly endangering it.”

  James smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, Grandma.”

  That earned him a smack between the ears but a good-natured one. “Well,” Gray Fang said, settling back on her haunches. “Let’s see if we can’t dig our way out of the hole you’ve put us in.”

  He nodded eagerly. “The Bedrock Kings control the Timeless Tunnels, so our first step is to get their attention. Do you have any idea how to do that?”

  “No,” she said, reaching back to pat her hand against a stack of old rugs piled in the corner. “But these might.”

  James frowned at the dusty woven mats. “What are those?”

  Rather than answer, Gray Fang grabbed a rug off the top and handed it to him. James took the thick mat of cloth gently with both hands. It was old and worn from many hands, but the image woven into it was still clear. Four elements—and not the Aristotelian ones—swirled together against a golden background. There was the Sun’s red fire and the Moon’s purple…whatever that was. Energy? There were also some white gusty lines that he assumed meant the Wind and blue waves which had to be the Water god.

  “What are these?” James asked, looking harder at the rug pile, which he could now see was full of similarly woven images.

  “The collected knowledge of our people,” Gray Fang explained, leaning back on her pillow. “We pass most things down by word or song, but that method has its flaws. Us old cats don’t always remember things right, so that which we cannot risk getting wrong gets woven into rugs to preserve it.” She chuckled evilly. “It’s usually the apprentice’s job to reweave the damaged ones from scratch. I’ve remade that entire stack in my time. If you stick around long enough, you’ll do it too. It’ll serve you right for bringing so much trouble to my door.”

  Looking at what would have been the anthropological find of a century back home, James didn’t think having to study these rugs would be a punishment. He was already wondering if there were any rugs with information about Forever Fantasy Online’s mysteriously absent Moon god, the one Xthr had named as his protector and the Grand Schtump referred to as “The Silent Moon.”

  “Anyway,” Gray Fang went on. “If any jubatus on the grasslands has ever found a way to bring the Bedrock Kings to the surface, it’ll be recorded in there. Your job is to dig through that pile until you find something we can use. And by ‘dig’ I mean carefully search while handling every weaving as if it were the Bastion itself.”

  “I will treat them with the utmost respect,” James promised, holding the rug she’d handed him as carefully as he would a newborn child. “But where will you be?”

  “Here,” Gray Fang said, closing her eyes as she took another puff from her pipe, the smoke from which smelled suspiciously like a certain five-leafed plant back home. “You dropped all of Bastion on my head, and I’ve been dealing with life-or-death politics for a night and day now. I’m tired. You’re the young apprentice brimming with energy and bright ideas. You can work. I’m going to sleep. Wake me up when you find something useful.”

  That was fine with James. He’d already pulled down a whole armful of rugs to start searching through. When he turned to ask SB’s opinion on the larger-than-life elf figures stitched into the first one, though, the Assassin was already asleep, slumped over on the rug next to his empty plate.

  “Some help you are,” James whispered, but not unkindly. SilentBlayde’s knowledge of FFO’s lore had never been more than an excuse, anyway. Sleep was what his friend needed, so James tossed a blanket over him and let him be, shuffling over to the far side of the small room, where the afternoon sunlight had made a glowing square on the lodge’s plank floor. Spreading the rugs out in the sunlight, James set to work, muttering his findings under his breath so he wouldn’t wake anyone up.

  ***

  Going through the rugs was more work than he’d anticipated. They looked simplistic at first glance, just a stack of rudimentary drawings depicting various magical concepts and important events from the Savanna’s history. But the longer James studied them, the more he saw. Every stitch seemed to have something extra woven into it. Secret images were everywhere, expanding the simple tales with new information and nuance.

  By the time the sun set, he was only a third of the way through the stack. When the constant meetings in the main room finally put out their lamps and adjourned for the night, James summoned glowing orbs of magical water to cast a shimmering aqua-colored light over the room so he could keep working. This gave him a horrible eyestrain headache that not even healing spells could fix, but he didn’t dare stop.

  It was a humbling night. James had always considered himself an expert on FFO’s lore. It was one of the few areas in his life he’d ever felt confident about. But the longer he studied the rugs, the more he realized just how full of holes his knowledge was. There were so many important figures he didn’t recognize, so many events he’d never heard of. Given that everything he knew about this world came from Leylia’s waking dreams, the gaps weren’t surprising, but James hadn’t realized just how much he didn’t know until it was staring him in the face. He was still trying to get his brain around it when Gray Fang finally woke up.

  “What time is it?” the old cat asked groggily.

  James glanced out the window at the lightening sky. “About an hour before sunrise, I think.”

  Gray Fang made a face that turned into a yawn, stretching her long, bony body like the cat she resembled. “What progress have you made?”

  “Well,” James said, drawing the word out as he pointed at the smallest of the many piles he’d stacked the rugs into. “Those are the ones I understand, and the rest are the ones I don’t.”

  His mentor chuckled. “Not as easy as you thought, eh?”

  James shook his head. “I thought I knew everything there was to know about this world,” he confessed. “But it turns out that I only know the big stuff, and not even all of that.” His shoulders slumped. “I’m useless.”

  “Not useless,” Gray Fang said, flashing him a smug, fanged smile. “You’ve learned the depth of your own ignorance, which is the first step toward actually knowing things.”

  That was one way to look at it, James supposed.

  “Here,” Gray Fang said, scooting closer. “Show me what you did understand, and we’ll work from there.”

  Sighing in frustration, James turned to the small stack of rugs he had been able to decipher. He was showing them to Gray Fang when the pile of blankets in the corner stirred, and SilentBlayde sat up.

  “K
oko wa doko?” he muttered, rubbing his face.

  “SB, dude, wake up,” James replied in the Central tongue. “You’re speaking Japanese.”

  The elf blinked and rubbed his face again. When he opened his blue eyes the next time, they were much more aware. “Sorry, James,” he said, looking around at the wood-and-hide structure in confusion. “Why are we in the lodge?”

  James didn’t want to sour his friend’s vastly improved mood with reminders of how he’d acted the night before, so he stuck to the most positive spin possible. “I had some work to do, and I was hoping you’d help me with it.” He turned back to Gray Fang, who was staring at SB as if she were afraid he’d be sick on her floor at any moment. “Master, this is SilentBlayde. He knows more about FFO’s history than any player I’ve met.”

  “Oh good,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Another child who thinks they know it all.”

  James winced, but if SB was insulted, his perfect face didn’t show it. “Thank you for taking me in,” he said, reaching over to retrieve his ninja mask from the corner, where James had stacked his armor. When the cover was back in place over his face, he turned to James and bowed so low his forehead hit the floor. “I am sorry I caused you so much trouble,” he said, his words muffled by the rugs. “It won’t happen again. Thank you for picking me up.”

  “Of course,” James said, frantically pulling SB out of his kowtow before he died of embarrassment. “You’re my friend. I’d never leave you to wallow. But if you’re feeling up to it, I could really use your help.”

  Gray Fang gave him a scathing look. James responded with a pleading one. It was true SilentBlayde was looking much better after a night of sleep, but there was no way he was back to normal. Some nice, distracting, nothing-to-do-with-Tina busywork would do him good, and he really was the best lore guy James knew. Not that that seemed to mean much in the context of this world’s actual history, but he needed this, and eventually Gray Fang sighed.