You

Chapter Twenty-Nine



That night, gathered around my desk, the Heroes were noticeably shabbier than when I’d first met them. Brennan had run to fat; Leira’s face was windburned. Her hair was dry and frizzy, not the lustrous silk of a princess’s. Lorac’s hem was frayed and dirty, and Prendar kept glancing into the corners of the room with a jittery meth-head intensity. We’re your Heroes now, they seemed to say, like it or not.

“We told you the realm was in peril,” Prendar said. “Didst thou not believe us?”

“Okay, okay. But what are we going to do?” I asked.

“Lorac has a few things to say,” Brennan said quietly.

“Run the game,” Lorac said, and scooted himself forward. At character selection I chose Leira, who blushed a little.

REALMS OF GOLD III: Restoration (1987)

The screen showed what seemed to be a child’s drawing of a dirt road by a field of wheat. Sixteen-bit crayon colors, green grass, brown dirt, gray rocks. It was the cutting edge of mideighties graphics tech, the first graphical portrayal of the world of Endoria—whereas Realms II had been a chessboard map of the otherworld, Realms III was a blurry window into it. I was seeing Endoria—through a shitty sixteen-color graphics mode, but I was seeing it.

There was a figure at the left side of the screen, a forty-pixel-high woman with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, blue eyes, and a button nose. She wore a leather jerkin and a dagger at her hip. The Heroes had just started the process of evolving from game pieces into people. It was (although Simon and Darren didn’t know it) the same way Dungeons & Dragons had started, the first role-playing game, when tabletop strategy-game rules had been modded to include individualized heroes with their own traits. In 1987 Leira, Brennan, Lorac, and Prendar were like late-Devonian fish struggling up past the high-tide mark on stubby, finny legs.

To me, as I huddled in front of the computer screen, the Four Heroes and I looked just like an old C64 magazine ad I remembered, a photograph of a kid and his computer and a bunch of dressed-up, sheepish-looking actors, there to show the grand worlds of imagination the game would unlock. Except, of course, that I was twenty-eight.

As Leira walked, pieces of the background scrolled past at different rates, giving a cute, crude sense of depth, another of Simon’s tricks. In the foreground, a muddy road. Then wet fields of stubble and orchards bounded by old stone walls. You passed the slowly dissolving outline of a house’s foundation, a broken catapult, and the shrine of a nameless deity, its features worn away but fresh flowers at its feet. Farther off, a shallow river; mountains; clouds.

After the final battle, an exhausted peace descended. Mournblade had disappeared. Perhaps carried off as a prize by a soldier. Perhaps buried under a mound of bodies slain by its wielder before the wielder himself was consumed. It was the closing of an era, and the gods had withdrawn even further from the world.

“I notice you haven’t been playing as me,” Prendar said as we walked, tapping the pointed toe of his shoe against my desk.

“I don’t really get you, to be honest. Aren’t thieves kind of… useless as a class? You’re like Brennan, but with weaker stats.”

“That’s why I have backstab. And poison. And I have infravision from my parents’ screwed-up marriage.”

“Cut him a little slack, Russell,” Leira said. “It’s not his fault he’s not game-balanced.” Ouch.

It starts to rain, and Leira dons a gray wool cloak with a hood. You could imagine her on that road since dawn, a whole day just walking through the fields and forests of the Long Marches in a cold rain that came and went. She probably slept in that cloak last night. She doesn’t mind the rain; you feel she could walk forever.

After a few hours she starts to pass farmers with carts full of produce and traders with covered wagons. A man stares at her from the back of a wagon, holding a crossbow inside, out of the rain. She can see the worn-down stock and the five mismatched quarrels in the quiver slung from the man’s shoulder.

You walk through the concentric walls of the old city, crumbling like smoke rings in the air, and into cobblestone streets. The sunset is banded with red, orange, and yellow, as elegant as it can be in the sixteen-color palette. The parallax effect is soothing and hypnotic. There is an armorer’s stall and I buy Leira a shield striped in blue and white.


“Stop,” said Lorac. “I will show you things few mortals ken. For this is WAFFLE, and mine is a dark knowledge.”

The renderer showed us what the world looked like, but Simon’s world engine WAFFLE pulled its strings. No one knew everything about how it worked. All they had was the API, the application programming interface (as laboriously explained to me by the guy sitting next to me that day, whose name I never successfully learned)—it fed parameters in and got data out, but it didn’t mess with what was inside. Simon built WAFFLE and he died, and left a black box at the heart of Black Arts.

Lorac led me through the rules.

a) It was a simulation, and it was pretty bossy. Designers didn’t run the economy, it did. If you wanted to say that a suit of leather armor cost ten gold pieces, you couldn’t tell it that. You might be able to jiggle a dozen other variables into place so that leather armor logically had to cost ten gold pieces. Or you could just let WAFFLE charge what it wanted to charge.

b) Objects and creatures acted the same way over a great many different contexts. A dagger was a dagger—as a character, you could pick up the dagger and use it. Any creature in the world, player-controlled or not, could also use it (provided the creature had hands, or a sufficiently prehensile tail).

c) Objects had a set of properties that made the same sense everywhere. An iron dagger was a weapon that could damage creatures; it could also damage certain objects (such as a length of rope). An iron dagger was magnetic; stone and bronze daggers were not. Flint struck against it would make a spark, and so forth.

d) Characters and creatures in the game had a decent amount of native artificial intelligence; in danger they would flee. They would pick up desirable loose objects, which was why that skeleton had looted my body the night I had played the game and discovered the bug. Later programmers had extended and added on to these behaviors, but the core remained. Like the simulator itself, character behavior wasn’t always easy to control.

e) Lastly, the engine (which is to say, Simon) was a complete bastard about saving your game. For a given character, it would save a record of your game when you quit; it would load that record when you started again. You couldn’t save during a game and keep playing, which meant that you couldn’t, for instance, save the game and then try something stupid or risky and then just reload your game if it didn’t work. The effect was that you played through as a single continuous narrative.

This last piece of code was one of a number of features that reflected deeply held ideas about video games that Simon had encoded into the system. Apparently he thought it helped players invest in the game as real; real risk, real consequences.

Its real effect, ultimately, was to limit the extent of the Black Arts audience—not everyone wanted to take these games that seriously. Sometimes they just wanted to goof around and try things. On the other hand, it also created a hardened core of Black Arts loyalists who would buy every game and who at parties would get into long philosophical arguments about the use of the Save command in games.

And no one, anywhere, knew what the letters in WAFFLE stood for.


“Okay, now what?”

“Play the damn game,” said Prendar.

A small plaza well back in the merchants’ quarter. A modest cobblestone circular plaza and, in the center, a worn-down statue of a bear on its hind legs silhouetted black against the purpling sky.

It’s almost nightfall when Leira sees the tavern’s light ahead, the Duke and Dancer. A shield hangs on the wall outside, the griffin sigil of Darren’s old kingdom. She ducks under the low door frame and steps inside. Self-conscious, she keeps a hand on the hilt of one long blade just to make sure it’s still there. There are two lanterns hanging from a thick wooden beam overhead, a beam that must have been cut from a hundred-year-old tree, a tree that probably never heard a word of Common spoken in its lifetime. A fire is going at the far end of the room, and everything smells like wood smoke and beer and sweaty people. It’s warm after a day of walking in the rain, and her cloak steams a little. The stew is salty and the dark ale is bitter and incredibly good.

The tavern is full of two dozen men, and Leira is comfortable being lost in the din. She’s small and used to not being noticed; it’s a talent. Most of the men are farmers and craftsmen, there every night of their lives, but the inn hosts a few travelers, too.

She thinks back over the day’s walk. Video game characters are only half there except when you’re involved. But the whole saga is built around their roles in the world, half you, half them, a grand-scale millennial puppet theater.

You know from writing the TDR that as a playable character Leira has a high movement rate and great bonuses on ranged attacks. But you know so much more about her, even more than the computer does, because inside the outlines there is what you put into them, so much more memory and awareness and feeling, a whole country of it. And as the evening wears on, she thinks, or perhaps you think, about a summer night in a storybook castle long ago, before the wars began.

You had skin under your fingernails. The prince crouched, cursing, and spat on the floor. You scanned the gallery. It was empty. The mirrored walls showed only candlelight, paneling, your strange, ashen face.

The ball was still at its height. It was the day you’d been looking forward to since you turned thirteen, the thing you’d lorded over your younger sisters. You were going to have a ball. You were wearing the pale green dress you’d forgone a horse for, and saw for the first time how poorly it suited you. You heard your father’s too-loud laugh over the music and the crowd. You tried to imagine how you would explain this to him. It seemed so implausible. You had always been the proper lady to your sister’s tomboy. You were the one they expected to marry off early. Nothing was going to prevent that—or was it?

Flustered, you cast around and settled on a silver candlestick. You held on to your skirt with one hand to keep from tripping over it as you swung the other hand in a broad, hearty sidearm motion that brought the candlestick’s thick, square base into contact with the prince’s kneecap. It must be midnight by now, you thought, and there were an enormous number of decisions to be made in a short time.


Enter Lorac. He has low hit points and armor but above-average foot speed. He has high intelligence, a wisdom bonus, three extra languages. Metal armor is forbidden; metal weapons are used at a major penalty. The spell caster allows four specialties. All magic items operate with a bonus. There is a 20 percent chance that he will be able to evade the effects of cursed items.

In Realms III Lorac has a range of powers that get him through his obstacles. A gesture that lets him drift slowly through the air instead of falling; a word that shatters nearby objects. For all his age, he looks unruffled by the obstacles. When the rain comes he adjusts his hat, but that’s all. In town he gets to choose new robes. When he enters the tavern he gives Leira a sidelong look but doesn’t speak to her. In the firelight he looks a little like one of the three kings of the Nativity scene.

He wasn’t a king but he might have been a king’s vizier, a cunning man and master of many subtle arts. One of the ones who secretly lusts for power, and one day he betrays the king.

Why? It’s hard to remember, just that every step seemed at the time like the logical and smart and easy way to play it. Maybe it wasn’t before, but now it’s what you do. It’s your story.

You saw your moment. The king wasn’t watching, and you stole the key to the royal aviary, in which there was a magic bird whose magic songs foretold the future. Of course it went wrong. You’re not royalty and you’re not the hero of the story. You’re just a civil servant with a prelaw degree and a flair for languages. What made you think you could hang with the royals? Princes and kings have this kind of story in their blood.

When the king came back you panicked like a fool. Your sorcery lit the tower, but he tossed you into the moat anyway. It was the birdseed you bought, in the marketplace, the day you were wearing that disguise. It wasn’t that good a disguise, was it? Who knew a king would have those kinds of connections on the street? If they’d enacted the educational reforms you’d asked for, those f*cking urchins would have been in school, where they belong.

The townsfolk threw vegetables as you limped, dripping and sobbing, through town. The worst of it is, that king really liked you. He was a genuinely nice guy, never made you feel bad about the money thing from the first day you roomed together. As vizier you lived at the palace, ate with his family, played with his children, showed everybody magic tricks, and told stories from your early life, before the days of jewelry and fancy hats.

You pawned your scepter of office for enough money to book passage out of the kingdom. No more dining on pheasant, no more carpets, no more starlit desert nights. You never wanted to see that place again. There are other lands, other kingdoms. You walked north until no one had heard of your crimes. You’ll go as far as your movement points will take you.

You rode on barges, slept out on deck under the stars, bargained with men in their own tongues. At first your academic diction marked you as a stranger, but gradually you picked up their vernacular rhythms, dropped the subject and your fancy tenses. You crossed the continent’s central desert in the company of a caravan, entertained their children with fire tricks from a first-year alchemy class you dug out of your memory. In return, a wiry, tan man taught you the basics of fighting with a short blade by grabbing your arms and yanking them into position. You left the caravan at the foot of a mountain range, and you kept going.

In the mountains you learned another form of magic, whatever’s fast and cheap. There was no time for a three-hour warm-up, and there was no place to get powdered peacock bone; there was only time to shout or make a rapid sketch in the dirt. You lay by your fire, looking up at the stars, and your days at the academy, your days in the king’s court, all of it seemed far off, which is what you’d like, really. Farther, if you could possibly get it.

On the far side of the mountain, the country was different. You met your first dwarves. They’d heard of your country, but maybe one in four could name the king, and none could speak the language.

You moved north through the forest lands while the long summer lasted, following the track of a lazy green river. At night you heard bats hunting in the warm air. You crossed a low stone wall that once marked the border of a farm. No one had lived there for centuries. You had never felt that alone, or that free. After weeks of travel you reached the northern ocean, and walked east.

Caracalla is a city you didn’t know, a northern city that trades with the hunting and mining tribes. No one you knew, no one from your family, had ever been there. At first, tradesmen looked askance at your currency. You decided to wait a few days before booking passage north.

You slept alone at an inn that first night, lying awake long into the dark. The city was never quite silent. You heard bells, here and there a shout, the yowl of a cat, or hooves. You smelled horses, dirt, the ocean.

In the darkness you thought again about who you were before this, a life you remember less and less well, but what you remember doesn’t flatter you. You remembered lying to people about what you were thinking and feeling. You remembered constantly thinking about how unhappy you were. It was very different from the way you are now, before you wore a dagger and slept in forests.

You fell asleep trying to count days, trying to guess how many weeks are left before the snow will cut off the mountain passes. In the morning you learned how to negotiate with a sailor. You’re not sure if you’re here for forgetfulness or redemption, but you notice they’re not calling you a vizier anymore. They call you a wizard.


Brennan has an easy time on the road. High strength, endurance, hit points, medium speed. All weapons usable, bonus with long sword or dagger. When the rain comes he lets it fall on his broad bare shoulders, but ties his long hair up in a bun over his round, boyish face. Bandits are nothing to him, he’s—God, twelfth level or something. He faced down the spider queen herself in her mountain lair. He can let his mind wander.

There was a yellow patch in the snow by the side of the roadway. They stood around it, eight of them, mildly puzzled. There was a faint smell of wood smoke, but otherwise the mountains were silent.

Your two cousins exchanged glances behind your back. They were each fifteen years older, almost twice your age, but a few inches shorter. You outranked them by birth, but they’d ridden this way a dozen times before, and the bearers had long since stopped looking at you for confirmation of your orders.

Your father was getting older, and your brother was spending more and more time running the place, so it was your turn to ride out with the annual tribute caravan, through the pass and over the mountains you’d heard of but never seen, carrying your family’s third-best sword to the stronghold of the House of Aerion.

“Bandits, maybe. We’ll go have a look,” Eran said, the dark one. The two older men set off through the trees, up a short ridge and out of sight, one looking back to make sure you and the others stayed put. But the snow was half a foot deep and it was getting on to sunset, and the other men got cold fast. The wait was awkward; the party had run out of things to chat about an hour into the first day.

What if your cousins weren’t coming back? What was happening? Sound didn’t carry well in the snow. After ten minutes of looking at the other men and the darkening sky, you cleared your throat and said, “I’ll just look. To see what’s happening.”

You climbed the ridge and looked off into empty pine forest. Your cousins’ trail was clear. You walked quickly, breaking through the snow at each step, already feeling too hot in your chain mail. Up ahead you heard what might be a man’s grunt—how far off? You started to jog, then ran to a cleared space, where your cousins were fighting four men.

They stood, swords drawn, with their backs to a tree. Berik, the fair one, was on one knee, with no wound showing but drops of blood in the snow around him. Four men were fanned out in front of them. They were dark-skinned, wearing embroidered cloaks. Southerners? Two held spears with bronze heads; one had a broad, short sword of old and discolored metal. One had a proper heavy longsword. It seemed silly, four against two, the kind of fight you’d fall into while goofing around at the end of arms practice. You weren’t supposed to win, just have fun battling the odds.

No one looked at you. Eran rushed the swordsman on his extreme left, trying to push him away from the others. Berik turned to watch, and a man put a spear into him, soundlessly, once and then twice to be sure. Metal was banging against metal. You stepped forward and lunged at the spearman’s neck with your sword. It went right in and stuck there. It was like a trick, a sword through a man’s neck, made more absurd by the way the man stuck out his arms and looked around. You wanted to laugh, but another man with a sword ran at you and tackled you. You landed on your back, then twisted to the top, the way you used to wrestle your brothers, except this was a stranger, heavy and stinking of sweat and smoke and thrashing under you, biting unfairly as your brothers never would, and that was the enraging thing. You shifted your weight and pinned the man’s sword arm with your left hand and got your right forearm stuck under the man’s chin and pushed with all your strength for long, long seconds, long after you would have let up in a play fight. You held it there until your opponent stopped moving and someone jabbed you rudely in the small of your armored back.

You rolled to your feet with the attacker’s tarnished short sword in your hand. How had it gotten dark so fast? You remembered now how Eran had been calling your name for some time, then he’d stopped and turned into one of the black shapes on the ground.

Now you felt warm, like you could make the world go in slow motion. The last man was small, thick under his cloak, with wide-set eyes. He was castle-trained but fatally tired, and he knew it. It was almost too easy to knock his blade out of the centerline, slip his guard, and strike him in the temple with the hilt. The thought, involuntary, was that you were killing the third man of your life and no one was watching. You never knew who they were or what started the fight.

Your father’s men had gone, in which direction you couldn’t tell. It was starting to snow. You sobbed a few times with shock and exhaustion. The strangers’ camp wasn’t that far. You sat in the dark under the firs and watched snow fall, hissing into the coals. Your cousins were freezing solid a hundred yards away. Your mind jumped from one image to the next, Berik dying, the swordsman’s blue eyes, climbing the stairs of the roundhouse in summer, your cousins talking about a peasant girl they’d shared, a girl you’d grown up with.

You woke up three or four times in the night, terrified, thinking you heard voices, and that was when you realized that what you dreaded most now was your father’s men coming back to find you and take you back to your old life, your coward of a father, and the name of a house that would never rise again. In two weeks, you thought, you could be anywhere.

I bought Brennan a shield with a griffin on it, crimson on a field of gold.


Prendar is the only one left. Quick and stealthy, with devastating surprise attacks. Forbidden from wearing metal armor, but bow, dagger, and sword are all permitted.

You can imagine Prendar’s home as clearly as you can your own. It was a muddy village of three hundred at most. Everyone knew him, everyone knew his mother was gone, and everyone knew his father worked his field during the day and at night sat in his home in the dark like a f*cking ghost. He learned his letters from a priest who came through once every two weeks and taught whoever would listen. He knew the long chants that told the history of the world, and he could draw the shape of the entire continent in the dirt, with a dot for where the village was.

Prendar wore his hair long but the truth was obvious. Elven blood shows, even in a half-blood. It took a stranger to point it out, a traveler, drunk and hateful, who seized him by the hair and dragged him into the street. Prendar jerked away, and was out of the village before anyone had a chance to follow, over a low fence and through an overgrown field to the forest. He wasn’t hurt that badly, just bruises and a bloody nose. He stopped and washed his face. At least he was wearing shoes.

He had nowhere to go, so he waited in the woods for the priest to pass on his way to the village. The priest had already heard what happened. They talked a long time as they walked together from one league marker to the next. The priest gave Prendar his hat and a bronze coin stamped with a crown on one side and a coiled sea monster on the other. He explained how to find due north using the stars, and made Prendar repeat it back. Prendar thanked the priest and, with no more ceremony than that, he set off walking.

(None of this has any relation to you, a person with normal-looking ears who went to high school and college in good order, who had normal parents and suffered no beatings to speak of. You would not, frankly, have had the guts in a million years to run away, no matter what you told yourself as you lay awake.)

The intervening years have given Prendar five inches in height and a cloak he can travel in, as well as matching long daggers he’s learned how to use. It’s late in the autumn season, and that long-ago quest was forgotten the first night he spent in a city.

He was paid prodigiously, but it was his last night in the city-state of Arn. The wars of the Second Age brought him better fortunes. But those wars ended some time ago. He wondered if his mother had survived them or lay dead in an unmarked field. He’d find her one day. Elves lived forever, didn’t they? Maybe he would, too.


The scarred, muscular man with long hair tied back in a bun and a hunted look around the eyes, a weathered, cord-wrapped sword hilt projecting above one shoulder. An older man, bearded, his cloak stiff with whorls of gold thread. A tall, pale half elf dressed in gray with sandy red hair and a beak of a nose. Like the older man, he wears clothes that were expensive a long time ago.

I’d never thought of them except as game pieces, as tiles on a map: sword, staff, arrow, dagger. In the new engine, they’re people. Each one stops in the doorway, hesitates, then slowly takes a seat in an unoccupied corner. They’ve seen each other across many battlefields but never before in peacetime, across the scarred wood of a tavern.

What now? There’s no reason to fight; all those reasons died with the Second Age. The great Four Heroes of the Second Age are now stateless wanderers.

They’re aware of each other. Lorac, who sits with his bitter ale half drunk, nervously ghosting through ritual gestures with limber hands. Prendar, who fidgets in his seat, well into his second tankard. He flirts with a bar maid, and plucks a white flower from her hair. Brennan, who sits completely still, staring straight ahead, one finger resting on the hilt of the sword leaning against the bench.

Only one corner remains free. The moment you, Leira, take a seat there, time accelerates. In the space of a few seconds the sky outside dims to blue-black, a yellow crescent moon surges into view, and twinkling stars appear. It’s approaching midnight, and most of the regulars have left. The fire burns low, but the four travelers haven’t moved from their corners yet.

The image fades out with the words,

AND SO THE FOUR TRAVELERS MADE A SACRED VOW, TO FIND AND DESTROY MOURNBLADE, AND TO RECOVER THE HYPERBOREAN CROWN OF THE KINGS OF OLD.

THIS WAS THE DAWN OF THE THIRD AGE, THE QUEST FOR THE RESTORATION OF THE WORLD.

It’s only when you finish the entire damned Realms of Gold III and start on the next one that you see one of the deep truths of the WAFFLE engine. Because when you type rogiv.exe, you get the prompt Import rogiii.dat?

Lorac reached in and depressed the Y key with one long, stained fingernail, then gave me a long look, as if to say, “On this everything depends.”

When played in order, each game imports the previous game’s end state. Which is to say, if a character found a unique item or a highly developed skill in add-on packs like the House of the Unborn Duke, that item or skill will be present in his or her character sheet at the beginning of Forbidden Tales. It was an odd idea but not unheard of, and it lent the game the quality of an Icelandic saga or a long-running soap opera. It even seemed as if the Heroes’ AI files noted certain experiences. As a player you never controlled more than one Hero at a time, and the Heroes you weren’t using were programmed to act reasonably autonomously while following you around—to fight when attacked, collect useful valuable items, and (usually) avoid walking off cliffs. After Prendar and Brennan were tricked into fighting each other in Elven Intrigue, Prendar never again healed Brennan in battle or even walked near him in the lineup.

I thought about how that was supposed to play out. They were video game characters. They’d been sentenced to run and jump for their entire lives, to quest and fight in causes not their own. Longer than their whole lives, because they’re going to die and be resurrected forever. They’re pieces in a cosmic game, and they know it. They can only do what you tell them.

In the tavern, they fall into conversation, haltingly at first. War stories, mostly. They’ve all heard the same story, told around the campfires of an army that marched west to the Elder Wars and the lost crown. The story of the king who fled south from Shipsmount when the dragons first came, who journeyed to the White Mountains and never returned, leaving his crown there. That crown was worn by the kings who built the walls that once surrounded this city, the kings who ruled before the great crash at the end of the Second Age.

And what brought that on? Brennan describes the aftermath of the battle, to which he arrived too late. Bodies piled high around a king, who died afraid. Mournblade, the cursed blade that is a cancer, the black sword, the black temptation that makes any wielder an immortal killer while slowly eating him or her alive.

Already the necromancer in the east and the merchants’ convocation, as well as any number of petty nations and warlords, were at work tracing it. Mournblade had proven itself a weapon to devastate armies and murder sovereigns on the battlefield. And who would stop it from ravaging the world forever, for all the ages to come?

The fire dies and you, Leira, stumble to bed, still thinking of the feast days, which matter less than they used to, and the mean look in merchants’ eyes, and cheap, ill-made goods, and the feeling that one man cannot trust another, and what force, if any, can repair the broken world.

But it’s awkward in the morning. The four of you are in the tavern common room, the two southerners sitting together silently, Prendar and the wizard off in separate corners eating the gray oat mush the tavern offers. Without the firelight’s warm tones and flickering shadows, the room seems smaller. The stone floor is filthy, and the smell of urine cuts through the smoke.

The spell of last night is gone, and the remembered intimacy is embarrassing now. It would be easy to nod and step outside and keep walking, all the way up to Shipsmount in a day and a half, but somehow nobody does. You don’t want to forget about how it felt to talk about the crown. Everyone is waiting for everyone else.

The bearded man stands to go. You clear your throat. You’re lousy at breaking the ice.

“Where are you bound, mageborn?”

“West, perhaps, across the mountains, maybe. If it matters to you.”

“I might be going that way,” you reply. You sound younger than you mean to, and you hope he doesn’t notice. The last thing you need is another father figure.

The scarred man stands up and says, a little too eagerly, “We’re walking that way ourselves. To Orenar, perhaps, before the winter closes the pass.” He wears chain mail, and the hilt of his longsword is wrapped closely with fine wire, a journeyman’s sword.

“A strange chance, but mayhap a fortunate one,” you add.

“I’m Brennan,” says the swordsman to the room, pausing briefly, as if we might have heard the name.

“Leira,” you say.

“Lorac.”

“Prendar.”

I can feel them even though they’re not real, they’re not even fictional characters. They’re simultaneously less and more than real characters. Less because they don’t have real selves. They don’t have dialogue, or full backstories. They’re just a bunch of numbers. They’re vehicles or tools players use. They’re masks.

But more because part of them isn’t fiction at all, it’s human—it’s their player half. It’s you. Or Simon, or Darren, or Lisa, or Matt. And I wonder what that moment is like for them, when they become playable. It must be like possession, like a person succumbing to the presence of a god or daemon. A trance, then a shuddering, as of flesh rebelling against the new presence. Then the eyes open and they’re a stranger’s. The new body is clumsy; it stumbles around, pushes drunkenly against walls and objects, tumbles off cliffs.

But what’s it like for the god that possesses them? There’s a little bit that goes the other way. The fleeting impression of living in their world, playing by their rules.

The Heroes swore to find Mournblade themselves and destroy it—swore by the great secrets, by the fifty-six opcodes, by the sixteen colors and three channels and four waveforms, by KERNAL, whose stronghold is $E000-$FFFF, by the secret commander of the world, whose number is 6,502.

They didn’t know the vow would follow them through a hundred lifetimes, through the end of the Third Age and beyond. Through seven generations of console, through the CD-ROM and real-time 3-D and graphics accelerator revolutions. For that matter, they didn’t know they were characters in a series of video games.

It was one thing to destroy Mournblade, but it didn’t have to happen right away, did it? It was hard not to think of what you could do with Mournblade’s long, black, soul-devouring weight in your hand.

It could have all kinds of uses, Lorac thought, calculating the to-hit and damage penalties he’d suffer using a class-inappropriate melee weapon. It could be a tool for redemption, or maybe for finishing the job he’d started. He could always decide when he got there.

Why not bring it back home to the folks, why not teach people a lesson, teach a lot of people lessons? Leira thought.

Brennan was in fact reasonably clear with himself that he’d think about destroying Mournblade only after he pulled it from the heart of the last son of Aerion. He thought about his sad father’s humiliation. That wouldn’t happen to him. Prendar had already thought out how many people he’d have to kill per annum to keep the thing going indefinitely—if there was one thing a game character understood, it was mechanics.

Brennan, Leira, Prendar, and Lorac were the characters, but you were the one who would decide what to do. You would come into their world, and your decisions would be the only ones that mattered. Why not take the sword, if that was allowed? Why not smash all the rules there ever were, and live forever if you could?