The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  “All right, folks,” Tina said, hauling the chain back in and handing it to Neko, who returned it to her pack. “Showtime.”

  The others nodded, gripping their weapons tightly as Tina turned to lead them up the ghostfire-lit stair.

  “What do we do if the Once King isn’t there?” SilentBlayde whispered, climbing silently beside her.

  “Celebrate,” Tina whispered back. “If he’s not waiting for us on the terrace, then we get to destroy the Great Pyre for free.”

  “You think we’ll get that lucky?”

  Tina didn’t bother to answer. He already knew. They all did. There was only one place left in the mountain that the boss could be, and it was the one that gave him the greatest advantage. Up on the open mountaintop with no walls to box him in, the Once King could use his wings freely, and he was right next to the source of all ghostfire. Tina didn’t know if proximity to the Great Pyre actually made him stronger, but she wouldn’t be surprised. If nothing else, the king could physically toss them into the undead flames—or off the mountain entirely. Just as it had back in the game, the Terrace of the Great Pyre gave the Once King ultimate home-field advantage. Of course he’d be there.

  Everyone else must have come to the same conclusion, because the normally rowdy Roughnecks were silent behind her. Even the clang of their armored boots on the stone steps sounded muffled as they closed the final distance, emerging from the dark of the artificial tunnel into the open air of the mountain peak.

  Tina’s feet missed a step as she strode onto the terrace. She’d made this trek so many times during the game—usually at a dead run, since she had to be the first one up here so she’d be ready to taunt the Once King when he landed and entered phase two—but the transition from mountain tunnel to sky had never hit her as hard as it did now. All at once, the protective layer of stone vanished, leaving her puffing in the thin air beneath the eternal gray clouds. She could see the whole of the Deadlands from up here, as well as the surrounding snow-capped mountains and even the faint green speck of the Verdancy far to the west. It felt as if the whole world was spread out like a blanket beneath them, and perched high above it like the monarch he was stood the Once King.

  Tina had to hand it to him: dude knew how to make an entrance. The enormous winged elf was standing at the center of the enormous circular stone terrace, his white hair crowned with the brilliant blue glow of the wall of ghostfire rising from the huge black bowl on the dais behind him, the Great Pyre.

  Honestly, Tina had never bothered to look much at the pyre itself. She’d always been too focused on the boss and her upcoming world-first kill to waste attention on yet another batch of ghostfire. Now that things were real and not just rendered images, though, it was impossible to miss just how aptly named the Great Pyre was. Not only was it absolutely enormous—a great black cauldron of Eclipsed Steel the size of a swimming pool, spouting blue-white flames as tall as trees—but the bowl itself was packed to the brim with the enormous, beautiful, twisted bodies of Celestial Elves. There were hundreds of them, their backs still bearing the burned-off stumps of wings that must have been as big as the Once King’s.

  Given where they were, Tina’s first thought was that their wings must have been consumed by the ghostfire. But despite being the foundation of an eternal undead fire, no other parts of the Celestial Elves’ bodies were burned. Quite the opposite. The corpses looked perfectly preserved, so much so that Tina could still clearly see the terrible anger and sorrow on their faces. That expression was mirrored in the face of the last living winged elf standing in front of them now.

  “Welcome, players,” the Once King said in a terrible, final voice, “to the end of the world.”

  “Oh yeah?” Tina growled, snapping back to herself as she raised her shield. “Because I’ve got a fresh raid here that says otherwise.”

  The king shook his head like a disappointed parent. “Always so rash,” he chided. “There is no need to be in such a rush, Roxxy of the Roughnecks. You have always been my most tenacious opponent. Ineffective, admittedly, but I can’t help but respect your undaunted spirit. Even now, in that diminished form, you have made it all the way to my feet yet again. Such spirit demands special recognition, and so I wish to make you an offer, a final boon before we cross blades one last time.”

  Tina held her breath, mindful of the raid doing the same behind her. Fuck. She could guess where this was going. Frantically, she debated attacking the Once King right now just to shut him up, but it was already too late. He was already speaking, lobbing his best attack at her raiders without even raising his sword.

  “This world is destined to end,” he pronounced in a ringing voice. “But you do not have to end with it. I am willing to send the Roughnecks home. All of you, right now. I can make the portal right here. All you have to do is step through it, and your Nightmare shall finally end.”

  He hadn’t even finished his offer before the players erupted. Shouted questions and accusations rang out over the howling wind, making Tina wince. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Forget knocking them off the mountain. This was so much worse. That bastard had just thrown a wedge into the crack she’d been frantically papering over since Bastion. Now she had to find a way to fix it before her whole raid flew apart.

  “Shut up!” she yelled, turning her body sideways so that she could address her raid and the king at the same time. “You’re asking us to abandon an entire world! Do you know how many of our friends have died to get us this far? What kind of people do you think we are to step over their bodies just to save ourselves?”

  By the end, she was talking straight to her people, but it was the Once King who answered. “I don’t know who you are,” he said slyly. “But you do. You all remember who you were back in your own world. If you kill me, that home will be lost to you forever. I’m giving you a chance—your last chance—to leave this place forever. You can return to your families and your comforts. All you have to do is put your weapons down and accept.”

  “Screw you!” someone shouted from the back.

  “Screw you!” someone else shouted. “I want to go home!”

  “How selfish can you be?” Anders cried, stepping out from the crowd to point a webbed finger at the Once King. “He wants to destroy this entire world!”

  “So what?” a voice yelled. “This place sucks!”

  “And it’s not like we actually had a chance,” another pointed out. “No one’s ever beaten this fucker!”

  “Guys,” Tina said, trying not to sound as panicked as she felt. “Stop and think a moment. The Once King wants to kill everyone. He’s only saying this to drive a wedge between us. We don’t even know if he can send us back to Earth.”

  “Then why are we here?” an ichthyian Sorcerer yelled. “I only voted for this plan because you said the Once King was our way home! I don’t want to be a fish anymore!”

  “That doesn’t mean you can burn this world to the ground!” Anders yelled at him. “What about those of us who can’t go home anymore?”

  “Yeah!” Frank said, stepping up beside the Cleric. “My body was falling apart on the other side. I reckon I’m already dead over there, which means I got no place for my soul to go home to. You gonna kill me as well just ‘cause you don’t like having fish eyes?”

  “Don’t be such goddamn wimps,” Killbox said, flexing. “Stay here and be awesome with us! Elf titties be rocking over here, and we’re gonna be heroes! We’re gonna get so much action when this is over.”

  “Fuck you, dude!” Neko said furiously, thrusting her leather-bound but still enormous bosom at the Berserker. “You try saying that after getting stuck carting this crap around! You’d be crying on the ground to get your dick back if you had to go through half the shit that I have! I’m sick of being a hero for everyone else! I. Want. Home!”

  “You’ll regret selling out,” SB warned. “If you do this, it’ll haunt you to the end of your days. Trust me, nothing is worth that.”

  “Easy for you to say,” ZeroDa
rkness spat, jabbing a finger at the elven Assassin. “You just got married to your teenage sweetheart, and Roxxy has her original body! Of course you want to stay. This place is a total win for you! But I’ve got kids waiting for me to come home. What about them?”

  Tina clenched her sword tightly. Behind her, the Once King was smirking, but she wasn’t keeping more than a cursory eye on him anymore. Her attention was on her raid, which was splitting apart in front of her. Forget the Million Damage Blast. This was so much worse. At this rate, the Once King wouldn’t have to lift a finger to beat them, but she had no idea how to stop it. This wasn’t an attack she could tank for them, but she had to do something. This was her raid, her Roughnecks, dammit. But how could she fix this? She’d promised SB she’d stay here, but she’d also promised to get Neko home. How did she keep both of those pledges? There seemed to be no way. Whatever they decided, someone was going to get fucked today, and it really looked to Tina like it was going to be everyone.

  Then, just as her panic was reaching the breaking point, Tina caught a flash of movement. Someone was coming up the stairs behind them.

  For a crazy moment, she hoped it was Red Sands. No, scratch that. Cinco would only make this situation a million times worse. Garrond was way better, but it wasn’t the paladin. It was a player, the one she’d been hoping to see more than any other. He was alone and exhausted, dragging himself up the stairs without even an Angry Cat to help, but Tina didn’t care. She’d never been happier to see anyone in her life than she was to see James emerge, blinking, into the gray daylight.

  “Everyone be quiet!”

  Her yell echoed across the mountains, shocking her raid into silence. Nodding, Tina turned and pointed at James. She had no idea what he’d found or why he was here or if he’d been successful, but if there was one thing Tina had learned about her brother since coming here, it was that he always knew what to say to make people stop fighting. Everything was falling apart anyway, so she decided to take a chance, gambling it all on her brother as she turned to glower at her Roughnecks with the best poker face of her life.

  “Shut up and listen,” she told them calmly. “James has something we need to hear.”

  Chapter 14

  James and Tina

  James stared at his sister in horror. Ahead of him, the Roughnecks were divided into two opposing groups, proof that the Once King’s plan had worked perfectly. And from the smug look on his face, Ar’Kan knew it.

  The wave of defeat that followed that realization was almost enough to send James to his knees. After leaving Fangs on the floor of the Once King’s throne room, James had tried to find his sister, but all he’d found were other raiders, their undead eyes filled with ghostfire. Cornered at every turn, he’d eventually fled back to the hall of tapestries where he and Ar’Bati had emerged from the secret stair after Sanguilar’s room.

  At the time, James had considered this a stroke of good fortune. Unlike Gray Fang’s rugs or the FFO wiki, the tapestries told the whole of this world’s history, or at least the Once King’s version of it. Since he was stuck there anyway, James had invested his time poring over the pictures, looking for anything he could use, anything to gain leverage, but all he’d found was more bitterness. So far as he could tell, the Once King’s life was divided into two halves: the paradise before the Sun’s betrayal and the hell that came after. But nowhere in the pictures did he see anything about why, and the more he thought about that, the less sense it made.

  The tapestries at the beginning of the hall, the ones that showed the awe and majesty of the Age of Skies, depicted the Sun as a kind and benevolent force spinning in an eternal dance with its beloved partner, the Moon. The gods were always depicted as two halves in balance, even as their children—the Celestial Elves and the Birds—hunted each other across the Sky. From everything James could tell, the Age of Skies seemed to be a paradise for the Sun as well, so why had it attacked? Why would a seemingly warm and loving god destroy its own happiness?

  Clearly there was something going on that the pictures didn’t show. James refused to believe that the benevolent Sun had up and turned evil one day for no reason. There must have been something—an event, a miscommunication, a mistake, something—that explained why the Sun had suddenly burned those most precious to it.

  Sadly, unlike the rest of the bad history, James couldn’t go to a primary source on this one. The only being in the universe who knew this truth was the Sun itself, and it wasn’t talking. Even the priests didn’t know the truth.

  And thus he’d found himself right back at the beginning. He was still going round and round when he’d finally heard the familiar shouts of the Roughnecks. By the time he’d found them, though, Tina and the rest were already halfway up the mountain with an undead raid hot on their heels. Unable to follow them up the sheer, icy cliff, James had backtracked to the throne room, where yet another fight had been going down between CincoDeMurder’s Red Sands and an incredibly geared group of undead players. He didn’t raid enough to know which guild they were on sight, but that kind of loot didn’t grow on trees. Still, raid gear had always been a disadvantage in PvP, and Cinco’s team was holding its own, which turned out to be James’s salvation. With the undead players so focused on Red Sands, he’d been able to slip right past. He’d tried to slip all the way to the back where he’d left Ar’Bati, but that would have meant going through the enemy healer camp. Even zombies would have noticed that, so he’d forced himself to stay on target, slipping in just as far as he needed to get to the wall that concealed the hidden spiral stairway.

  One blast of lightning had been all he’d needed to punch through the false wall and open the way. He’d hoped to catch Tina on the stairs so he could tell her everything and they could come up with a plan together, but like everything else today, things hadn’t gone his way. Now he was up here with everyone looking at him, waiting for him to tell them what to do, but James didn’t know. He didn’t know if there was a way out of this, and once again, he could see that the Once King knew it.

  Desperate to avoid his sister’s trusting stare, James looked up instead. It was nearly midday, not that you could tell in this place. Day or night, the sky in the Deadlands was always gloomy and dark thanks to the eternal blanket of thick gray clouds. Back in the game, he’d assumed that was for the spooky ambiance, but there was no programming holding the clouds in place now.

  Suddenly curious, James squinted at the sky. He hadn’t spent much time in the Deadlands since the Nightmare had ended, and that which he had had been constantly busy. Now that he was thinking about it, though, James could think of no climatological reason for the constant clouds to remain here on their own. Something had to be keeping them in place, and now that he was looking for it, James realized he could see the lines of magic floating over his head.

  He stepped back, awestruck. There was a huge spell in the sky, a net of air and water magic held together by blue-white tendrils of ghostfire. Not that that was a surprise—everything here was touched by the ghostfire—but that much of it in the sky had to be deliberate. The heavy clouds weren’t part of the Deadlands art design. The Once King was keeping them there on purpose, holding them in place so the Sun would never shine on his lands.

  And just like that, James knew what to do.

  “Listen, everyone!” he cried, snapping his head back down to look at the raid. “The Once King is lying to you! He already told me he doesn’t have the mana to send us home without draining the Great Pyre, which he’ll never do. He’s trying to trick you into fighting each other so you won’t be strong enough to fight him, but he wouldn’t have to stoop to such tactics if he wasn’t afraid. He knows you can beat him! And if you ever want to go home, that’s exactly what you have to do.” He pointed at the sky. “I think I know how to save this world and get everyone home who wants to go, but the only way to get there is to bring the Once King to his knees, and that’s only possible if you fight him together.”

  “You heard him!” Tina ye
lled as the raid began to murmur. “Did you all forget the plan? Since when do we negotiate with the undead? Of course he’s lying to us! We’ve got him running scared!” She turned and pointed her sword at the Once King, who was no longer looking smug. “Screw his cheap tricks! Roughnecks don’t compromise, and we don’t sell out! We’re going to kick his winged ass and go home. Now get back in formation, and let’s do this!”

  The raid roared in agreement, their cries shaking the stone as the two opposed groups rushed back together into one formidable whole. Breathing hard, James rushed forward as well, pushing through the crowd toward his sister. He was trying to get past a group of huge Berserkers chanting “Roughnecks! Roughnecks!” when something stepped out of his shadow.

  “Nice timing, James,” SilentBlayde said with a grin. “We knew you’d make it.”

  “You don’t know how happy I am to see you guys,” James said, grinning back at his friend. “Can you get me to Tina?”

  Rather than answer, SB took the lead, parting the raid easily to where Tina was waiting at the front.

  “Glad you’re alive, bro,” his sister said, never taking her eyes off the Once King. “What’s the plan?”

  “It’s a long story,” James said. “You see, back in the Age of Skies—”

  “Yeah, we don’t have time for that,” Tina interrupted. “I’ll listen to the whole thing later, after we’ve won. For now, just tell me what I have to do.”

  Fair enough. “Run him out of mana,” James said, gripping his staff. “And I don’t mean too low for the Million Damage Blast, I mean all the way. When he’s too drained to cast so much as a counterspell, I’ll take over.”

  Even knowing what he planned to do, that felt like a stupidly ballsy thing to say. To his amazement, though, his sister just nodded. “Will do,” Tina said, lifting her sword. “All right, Roughnecks, let’s do this like we planned. Ready?”