The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  “Hold on, Fangs!” he cried, frantically gathering the green, glowing life magics that floated through the air even in this dead place. “I’ve got you!”

  He was still building the spell when his brother reached up with a bloody hand to grab his staff.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t be stupid!” James hissed, tugging at his staff, which Fangs had a surprisingly tight grip on for someone who was dying. “I have to heal you before you bleed out!”

  The warrior shook his head. “Don’t waste your mana,” he wheezed, letting go of James’s staff at last to push himself over onto his back. “I’ve got too much health, remember?” He gave James a bloody smile. “Two-skull boss of Windy Lake.”

  As if James could ever forget. Fangs’s huge health pool had saved their bacon countless times, but all that HP didn’t mean squat if all his blood was on the floor instead of inside him. When he tried to cast again, though, his brother knocked his staff away with a furious look.

  “I said no,” Fangs rasped. “If we both die, this was all for nothing. You have to get what we learned to the others. Heal yourself and get out of here.”

  “I’m not leaving you!”

  “You’re not leaving me. I’m bravely staying behind so you can complete the mission.”

  “But—”

  Fangs shook his head. “This is something only you can do. To be honest, I didn’t understand half of what the Once King was saying. You’re the one who has the knowledge to search what he told us and find a way to defeat him.”

  “But I don’t know how!” James wailed, tears flowing down his face. “I don’t have a plan!”

  “You’ll think of one,” his brother said confidently, closing his eyes. “You always do. But you can’t think of anything while you’re bawling here, so go. Get to your sister, tell her what we’ve learned. I’ll hold him off.”

  That was ridiculous and they both knew it, but there was nothing else James could say. Ar’Bati was right. By the time James finished healing him, he’d be out of mana, the music box diversion would be over, and the Once King would be on them both. If he was going to run, it had to be now, but he couldn’t carry his brother with his own chest hanging open. He was already feeling lightheaded, a sure sign that he needed to take his own advice and heal up before he bled out and wasted both their lives. He could already hear the ballad wrapping up through the closed door, so with a sob and a final squeeze of his brother’s hand, James gathered his magic again and cast it on himself.

  For once, he barely noticed the bliss of the magical healing washing over him. The fist-shaped dent in his broken side was still pulling itself back together when he turned and fled, limping, then jogging, then sprinting down the cavernous ghostfire-lit hallway back toward the front of the fortress, where, he desperately hoped, his sister would be waiting.

  Chapter 13

  Tina

  Tina stood on the road to the Dead Mountain Fortress. It was well after dawn, not that they could see the sun through the Deadlands’ eternal ceiling of gloomy, ash-gray clouds. Admittedly, part of that lateness was her fault. Another, oddly, was Richard’s. The usually punctual Sorcerer had suddenly found a million things he had to do in camp, pushing back their march by almost an hour. But the majority of the blame for their late arrival fell squarely on the huge, skull-armored shoulders of the sulky-looking Berserker in front of her.

  “Took your sweet time,” she growled, glaring at Cinco as the Red Sands finally shuffled out of camp to join the rest of them. “Finally done licking your wounds?”

  “Fuck you,” he replied, glaring at the ground.

  “Uh uh,” Tina said, shaking her head. “The loser doesn’t get to say that shit to the winner. From here out it’s ‘Yes, Roxxy’ and ‘How high, Roxxy?’ Anything else and I’m taking your guild and giving it to Killbox, get me?”

  “Whatever,” he said, still not meeting her eyes.

  “Wrong,” she snarled. “Do it again.”

  CincoDeMurder raised his head at last. “Yes, Roxxy,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Oh, those words were sweet in her ears. Grinning like the bad winner she was, Tina waved for him to get back in line. Muttering under his breath, Cinco went, stepping out of the way of Commander Garrond, who was marching in Tina’s direction.

  “Will he be a problem?” the commander asked, eying Cinco’s back as the Berserker rejoined his subdued raid.

  “Nah,” Tina said. “We’re his only way home. He made his play and lost. Now his choices are follow orders or pitch a fit and risk being stuck here forever. And while I’m sure CincoDeMurder can throw a mantrum with the best, I don’t think he’s going to risk his ticket back to Earth just to screw me over.”

  The commander looked confused. “Mantrum?”

  Tina shrugged and turned back to the dread mountain citadel towering in the sky. “Ready to move out?”

  “My men have been ready since before dawn,” Garrond said sourly, but he left it at that, turning to study the fortress of their enemy with her. “The Order will take point. We have enough men to surround your raids completely. We’ll escort and protect you until it’s time to face the Once King.”

  “That wasn’t the plan,” Tina said angrily. “Your guys are here as backup, remember? The DMF is our turf. We go first.”

  “You players are the only ones who stand a chance against the Once King,” Garrond argued. “That’s why you’re here. If the fortress is not actually as empty as it appears, we’re all in for a fight. We can’t risk your raiders taking casualties before you even get to the top.”

  “If there are monsters in there, they’re going to clean your clocks!” Tina argued back, annoyed that she had to crane her neck to yell at him now. “The Order are all level-eight one-skulls. Even the trash mobs in the Dead Mountain are two-skull at least. If you take point, a ton of your guys are going to die. And don’t say you’re going to use your mass rez, because that ace is spoken for. If you spend all your mana using your big resurrection spell on the way in, it won’t be ready again in time for the Once King fight.”

  “I am aware of the tactical situation,” Garrond snapped. “But my men know what they are facing, and we remain committed to our oaths. If you players are truly the only ones who can free this world from the Once King, then it is the Order of the Golden Sun’s duty to deliver you to him unscathed. On my honor, we will get you to the top of the mountain fresh and ready for the fight no matter what.”

  Tina gritted her teeth, pissed as hell at Garrond for putting this on her. The men behind them were actually people now, not just NPCs. He could talk about duty all he wanted, but those deaths would be on her hands if she let the Order slaughter themselves. That said, Tina knew a losing battle when she saw one, and butting heads with Garrond was definitely losing. She’d just have to cross her fingers and hope the fortress really was as empty as it looked.

  “Fine,” she growled. “You can escort us, but no resurrections before we reach the top! I don’t think the Once King has recovered enough mana for a Million Damage Blast yet, but if he does get one off, you’re our only insurance.”

  “Again, I am aware,” the commander said, looking down at her. “I will not fail you.”

  Satisfied as she was likely to get, Tina nodded and gave the order to move out.

  It wasn’t a long march. They’d camped so close to the mountain, practically in its shadow, that even with their giant army, it took less than half an hour to reach the citadel’s enormous front gates, which were mysteriously open.

  Tina frowned. The last time she’d been here—before her ignominious transformation from stone to flesh—the enormous metal slabs had been sealed tight. Now, though, they were flung wide, almost like the Once King was inviting them in. She didn’t like that at all, but there was no turning back. Garrond was already leading his troops inside, forcing Tina’s raid off the road to make room. When she looked back to see if her Roughnecks were ready, though, what she saw made her beam w
ith pride. Every player was in position, arranged by class and armed to the teeth, their enchanted weapons and armor glowing blindingly bright in the dim Deadlands morning. She’d never seen anything more beautiful in her life. It was almost enough to make her cry as she hopped up onto the ancient skeleton of a broken catapult.

  “Roughnecks!” she cried, raising her small voice as loud as she could over the din of the Order’s marching. “It’s time! I’m so damn proud of how far we’ve come. We’re gonna kick all the asses today!”

  The raid answered with a roar she felt all the way through her chest. SilentBlayde appeared beside her a second later, flashing her a smile he no longer needed his mask to hide.

  “Everyone’s ready to rock and roll,” he reported. “We could kill the Once King right now if he was here.”

  It was technically Zen’s job now to tell Tina that sort of thing, but the Ranger looked happy to let SB take over reporting duty. Tina was happy, too. It was occurring to her yet again that this amazing man was her husband. She didn’t need to hide her feelings when he got close anymore. She could just reach out and touch him or hug him or kiss him. In the end, she did all three, pulling him down to her mouth right then and there.

  “Ugh!” Neko cried, making a noise like she was horking up a hairball. “If I’d known there’d be so many PDAs, I wouldn’t’ve helped you guys hook up!”

  Fortunately, the rest of the raid didn’t seem to mind. Everyone was too busy watching the Order march into the fortress, gripping their weapons nervously as Garrond’s soldiers vanished into the dungeon’s cavernous front hall.

  “So why do you think the door was open?” SB asked when she finally let him go.

  Down on the ground in front of them, Killbox snorted. “Duh. Obvious trap is obvious.”

  “Actually, I bet this is James’s doing,” Tina said, but even as the words left her mouth, she wasn’t sure she believed them. The fortress being empty was the whole reason they’d decided to come here, but as the mountain swallowed Garrond’s army like it was nothing, she couldn’t help feeling that this was wrong. No matter how cocky, bosses who were home alone didn’t just leave their front doors open. For the millionth time, she wished she hadn’t let James go.

  “Everyone, keep your eyes open for stray jubatus!” she called to her raid. “We might have a side quest to rescue my brother today.”

  As her people nodded, SB reached out to squeeze her hand. “He’ll be fine. James always lands on his feet.”

  A week ago, Tina would have scoffed at that. Now she could only nod. Even so. “Would you mind taking point?” she asked, squeezing his hand back. “I’m not sure Garrond knows where he’s going, and I need someone who can get back here fast if there’s trouble. And if you see James…”

  She couldn’t finish. The idea of James being undead was a very real possibility she couldn’t handle right now. It was selfish to ask Blayde to do it, but her husband nodded. “I’ll be your eyes,” he promised, lifting their joined hands to press a kiss to her armored fingers before vanishing into the Lightless Realm, his presence a comforting weight in her shadow before he flitted away.

  Satisfied she could trust him to do the right thing—or at least come back and tell her if the right thing had to be done—Tina settled in to wait. When Garrond’s forces were finally through the doors, Tina ordered her players to move in as well, keeping her eyes on the gray sky in case the Once King decided to cut to the chase and drop down on them again. But no terrifying winged shadows appeared. She didn’t even see one of his undead vultures. Just the low clouds hanging over their heads like cinderblocks as the Roughnecks marched at long last into the Dead Mountain.

  It felt slightly surreal walking back into the familiar raid dungeon after everything that had happened. This stupid place had been Tina’s home for most of the last year, and it still looked exactly like she remembered. The scale was a little bigger, but the rest of it—the undecorated black stone walls, the eerie blue light of the ghostfire torches, the grisly stains on the floor—was the same. The biggest difference was the emptiness. This room should have been packed full of skeleton patrols. Just walking through the doors, part of Tina was already braced for their horrifying, band saw–like alarm scream, but there was nothing. Just the echo of metal boots bouncing off cavernous stone and the nervous whispers of her raiders as they followed Garrond’s troops through the forest of stone columns to the doors that marked the entrance to Grel’Darm’s courtyard.

  This, too, was empty. Like, super empty. Not only were there no patrols, but the dungeon’s static dangers like the ghoul pits and giant corpse-spewing machines were quiet and still. What really got Tina, though, was that all the gates were open, even ones that had been permanently shut during the game. The iron portcullis that forced players to detour through the poisoned lab? Gone. They just walked right up the gently sloping ramp to the third terrace. Didn’t even have to take the stairs.

  “I don’t like this,” Tina muttered, clutching her shield closer.

  “What are you talking about?” Neko asked beside her. “This is awesome! I hate the poison level.”

  “Everyone hates the poison level. That’s what makes this so strange. Even without any undead to knock us in, crossing the bridge over the poison pools would probably still have killed a bunch of us. Why didn’t the Once King make us go through that? Why let us just stroll in?”

  The Naturalist shrugged. “I dunno. Maybe James hit the ‘Hold Door’ buttons on his way up. He’s thoughtful like that.”

  Tina hoped rather than believed she was right.

  The next two tiers of the mountain were more of the same: empty rooms, open doors, terrifying silence. The constant waiting for the ax to fall was making Tina jumpy as shit, so when something actually came out of her shadow, she nearly punched it in the face before she realized who it was.

  “Whoa!” SB said, dodging her left hook.

  “Sorrysorrysorry!” Tina cried, clutching her fist to her chest. “What’s wrong? Did you find James?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “I’m here because we hit a dead end. Sanguilar’s boss room is locked up tight. Garrond tried to bash the doors open, but they’re too heavy. There doesn’t seem to be any magic holding them together, though. It’s just weight, so I came back for some extra muscle.”

  That sounded straightforward enough, but Tina still didn’t like it. “Of all the doors, why would Sanguilar’s be sealed?” she asked, motioning for the rest of the players to follow as she and SB started up the stone corridor, which was built for an undead army to march down and was thus plenty wide to accommodate both the Roughnecks and Garrond’s anxious-looking Order troops. “He’s the last boss before the Once King himself. We’re only one terrace away from the throne room level. I mean, if you were going to block an invading army, surely you’d want to do it before they were in your face?”

  “Maybe he got scared,” NekoBaby said, brandishing her claws as she bounced up between them. “We’re pretty pwn-tastic!”

  “It could be left over from the game,” SilentBlayde said, flitting through the shadows to Tina’s other side, where Neko wasn’t blocking him. “Sanguilar was the only encounter that required a mini-game to open the door. Maybe all that programming that didn’t translate well when things got real.”

  Considering every other door had been open before this point, Tina didn’t think that was it. There was no way to know until they got through, though, and from the look of things, that was going to take some work.

  “Wow,” she said, gazing up at the pair of huge stone doors. Like everything else in this world, Sanguilar’s doors were a lot bigger than they’d been in the game. That was really saying something, because Sanguilar was the Once King’s general. Everything in his part of the Dead Mountain Fortress was sized for armies that included multiple corpse giants and siege weapons. His doors were no exception: a matched pair of fifty-foot-tall stone slabs whose black surface had been carved to resemble dripping blood. They looked ju
st like Tina remembered, except now all that intricate carving was broken up by a series of huge, smoking slashes, almost as if the doors had been attacked by a giant, angry cat.

  Tina’s lips quirked. “Holy sword not cutting it?” she asked Garrond, who was glaring at the gates as though he found their existence offensive.

  “No,” came the terse reply.

  “Okay then,” she said, cracking her knuckles. “Everyone with knowledge of modern physics to the front!”

  Richard came forward first, inspecting the doors with obvious fascination. Surprisingly, NekoBaby joined him, bouncing over to help him tap and push at the stone. She even climbed up the outer wall like a cat climbing a tree, peering into the hair-thin crack at the top of the doors before dropping back down to converse rapidly with Richard. After several minutes of this, they returned to Tina.

  “What’s the word?” she asked.

  “The doors operate on a simple hinge mechanism,” Richard reported. “But the hinges are recessed into the walls.” He turned and pointed at the smooth stone where the giant doors met the rest of the fortress. “This positioning prevents us from attacking the hinges directly, but there has to be a gap somewhere else, or the doors would not be able to swing open. They must also be lifted off the ground, else the friction of so much weight would prevent them from opening at all.”

  “And it would rip up the floor hella bad, too,” NekoBaby added.

  Richard nodded. “Since the floor is not scraped up, we know the doors can’t actually be sitting on the ground. That means their full weight must be resting on the hinges, so if we destroy those—”

  “The doors should fall over on their own,” Tina finished. “Gotcha. But you just said the hinges are hidden inside the wall. How are you going to get at them? Go through the stone?”