You

PART VII


ENDGAME





Chapter Fifty



Somehow you always knew. From one hundred miles up, you have a beautiful view across the Western Mountains to the Savage Ocean and beyond, to nations you’ve never discovered in all your time with Endoria’s champions, and it still stirs your spirit to know that there are lands yet to be explored.

You descend from orbit, and the barriers of time, space, and genre fall away at last. Diegetic conventions shred and transform at the sight of a Terran atmospheric runabout hovering on a jet of blue-white fusion flame above the stillness of the Pendarren Forest, itself the echo of KidBits’ scrubby pines, now grown to enormous size and trackless extent. The Heroes file out onto the surface, inhaling the illusory digital scent of their long-ago franchise. See that it is Pren-Dahr who sinks to his knees; it is Loraq who curses aloud.

SOLAR EMPIRES EXPANDED

CAMPAIGN SETTING: ENDORIAN ANOMALY

Black Arts Studios brings you a gaming experience like no other!

An adventure for slightly-too-advanced characters, Endorian Anomaly pits the galaxy’s rulers against an ancient evil.

Note: Characters from a science-fiction milieu may find this context particularly unnerving, portraying as it does a preindustrial civilization with annoying mystical abilities. They may draw their own conclusions. For some, a sufficiently advanced form of magic will prove indistinguishable from technology. For others, it will stir strange sensations of other lives lived and emotions forgotten, or mayhap deliberately pushed aside, on the not unreasonable premise that magic is for the primitives, the losers, and the gaywads of the galactic backwater. It matters not; the Endorian Anomaly scenario contains all game items and all game rules.

Note: Solar Empires’ Embarkation mode allows you to leave your ship and play as an individual unit, so you can board an enemy ship or venture forth onto the surface of a planet. In fact, it’s an inheritance from the game engine’s original function as a dungeon adventure game, repurposed to add an exciting gameplay mode to your Solar Empires experience.

You consult the tracking device. There is a clear signal coming from far to the east. The group is silent as they fly over lands where they fought on horseback, moving a thousand times faster than the fastest horse ever could. Down below it is somehow still—still!—the f*cking Third Age, its final end delayed for long, long eras as the Heroes busy themselves elsewhere. As you travel, the landscape below you changes from forestland to grassland to dark ocean. From high above you can see the shadow of a leviathan surging in the depths. At these speeds it is only an hour before you set down on the pebbled shore of an unknown continent. Outside, the day is warm and muggy, but you can smell the not unpleasant smells of grassland and forest and… adventure.

“Is this… what anybody was expecting?” Lisa asked.

“All that matters is we find it, right?” Don said. “And we can fix it?”

“Yes,” Lisa said. “It’s just weird.”

Darren shook his head and said, to no one in particular, “Simon, what did you do?”

Wise adventurers prepare for danger. The orbiter’s loadout includes a pair of blasters. Galactic empress Ley-R4 carries the ceremonial blade of her office even though she hasn’t drawn it in centuries. Loraq, of course, scorns all conventional weaponry. Pren-Dahr leads the party inland, flaunting his overland movement rate. It’s been so long since he’s had a ground movement rate, let alone an armor class! Brendan Blackstar lingers on the beach, trying to recall a half-remembered prophecy. A warning, wasn’t it? Well, it’s too late now.

It is not long before you encounter…

THE TOMB OF DESTINY

BY

SIMON BERTUCCI

What lies in the depths of Black Arts’ oldest and shittiest dungeon?

BACKGROUND

The Four Heroes reunite after many wanderings to discover at last the resting place of the legendary warrior-magus Adric and the accursed sword Mournblade. The Fortress of Adric lies in the far northern reaches of Endoria, amid the half-melted bones of the Great Ice Serpent, who lived far into the Third Age. The site has been abandoned for untold millennia, ever since the long-ago Correllean empire fell (see Correllean Dreams, various authors, Orbit, 1994).

Warning: This adventure is for high-level characters only. Naught but doom and defeat await you below! So you know.

KEY TO DUNGEON MAP

Starting Location

Aboveground, a mere two dozen slabs of stone in the mossy ground sketch the outline of what was once the mightiest fortress in the known world. Alert players (INT check at −4) will observe a small crater a few hundred yards to the east containing a half-buried capsule bearing the markings CCCP and the decayed shreds of a parachute. The capsule is empty. Loraq lingers at the site a moment longer than the others.

After a search, characters will notice a dozen stone steps leading down to a pair of doors built of the same stone as the rest of the fortress. A dwarf or experienced thief—although either would be an odd choice to go on vacation with—will observe that the gates have been opened and resealed several times.

Level 1: The Shallows

The stone complex is a simple maze built to no obvious purpose, terminating in a set of stone stairs leading downward. The air is dry and cold; the rooms are lit by gaps in the ceiling. Its ornamentation is sparse. There are crudely carved mossy granite and marble gargoyles and dry fountains in the larger rooms. The maze is empty and silent. Its floor plan resembles what you would draw in the last fifteen minutes of Western civ, which ought to at least have some cool castles in it, but what do you expect? Things never turn out the way you think.

Level 2: The Maze

Similar to the first level, but the walls and rooms form a more complex pattern, presumably a second layer of defense or the work of a more confident designer. You see the bodies of four or five ampers piled in one corner, mummified in the dry air. Once they were mysterious items of punctuation crawling through the dark; now, in color and three dimensions, they are, disappointingly, revealed to be thuggish bald men with tusks, wearing vaguely tribal leather gear. They were slain long generations ago, evidently by fire.

Level 3: Hall of Pillars

An airy hall of open construction punctuated by two rows of broad pillars that lead to a pair of white marble thrones on the far wall, the seat of absent monarchs. The air is growing warmer, with a hint of moisture. There are more dead ampers here, but these have rotted away to broken skeletons.

This may once have been an audience chamber, although not a very conveniently located one; maybe it’s there to congratulate people who can get through two pretty easy mazes. This marks the last point where anybody remembered constructing what was supposed to be a historical building rather than just going and drawing whatever they wanted.

Level 3: Inscription

You emerge into a set of corridors that form the puzzling words Darren Rules in cursive Roman characters (far away, its designer high-fived an associate producer). The hallways are mossy, and the air grows humid. Here and there a trickle of water flows down the walls and forms a running stream along the corridor.

Here you see what may be your first living ampers. It is unlikely they will stand up well to blaster fire. Ley-R4 draws her sword, which hums menacingly, a vibro-blade from the days when dueling was a deadly feature of life among the Martian aristocracy.

At the base of the second cursive e, adventurers will encounter a figure sitting upright against one wall. It is a corpse, long decayed, wearing a dark robe that survives, stiff with age. A staff surmounted by a broken animal skull lies a few feet from its outstretched hand. Players knowledgeable in the history of the Realms will recognize this as Dark Lorac, once the most feared wizard in this plane of reality. Characters of above-average intelligence may spot (20% chance) an additional set of small finger bones at rest nearby.

[I was startled by a cold pressure on my left hand. Lisa was handing me a Mountain Dew.]

Level 4: Pentagram

The passages form a five-pointed star surrounded by a circular corridor. This area of the complex has no obvious purpose other than to make it slightly more badass and reinforce the popular association between fantasy gaming and satanism. Observant adventurers will become aware that your grandmother is an insane bitch and even after a year your mother is not any closer to getting her head together, and the later you can stay at Darren’s each night the better the chance they’ll all be asleep when you get home, or maybe they’ll be dead or they’ll forget you ever existed (does that happen?) and you can live at Darren’s forever or maybe get your own place.

Another skeletal body is here, lying facedown at an angle where a point joins the circle. The bones lie across a charred patch on the stone. Pren-Dahr kneels down and picks out a pair of modern spectacles and a short length of wire. There is no weapon. Deep in the angle of the jaw you see what is either a small round pebble or a cyanide capsule.

Level 5: The Guardian Figure

The shape of this level forms a crude representation of a human body (Adric?), similar to the Long Man of Wilmington or other hillside chalk figures. It is very evidently male. It makes you wish someone would stop f*cking around; truly, this dungeon holds great evil.

Level 6: The Lady

This level has been built in the stylized image of a female face, architectural verisimilitude having been abandoned several levels ago.

The first body you find here lies on its side, with a long dagger resting between its third and fourth ribs; it displays tallness and slightly elongated fingers, toes, and cranium. Fifteen feet farther down the corridor, a skeletal hand still holds the hilt of a long black sword, the NightShard (artifact longsword; +5 to hit and damage; 4% chance of Soul Drain; wielder’s Altruism, Loyalty, and Mercy scores immediately fall to zero). The hand evidently once belonged to the human female whose skeletal remains lie on the very top step of the stairway down to the next, penultimate stage.

Ley-R4 may pick up the NightShard if it is found. She now has the option of remaining in Endoria, walking away from her job as empress of the galaxy, and returning to terrorizing the unjust from horseback. If she does, she will relinquish her ceremonial blade and the title to Brendan Blackstar, the true king of Endoria.

Level 7: A Giant Penis

Here, the walls form what we just might as well say is an image of an erect phallus. The three disconnected rooms to the west of the main complex were originally thought to be sealed burial halls. It is time for archaeological scholars to admit they represent airborne ejaculate.


“Oh, Jesus,” said Lisa. “Really?”

“What, you never saw that?” said Darren.

“Yes, but I deleted it.”

“I wondered if that was you. Yeah, I put it back.”

“Did you ever think that maybe that was why we got a B plus? Which is why I wasn’t class valedictorian?”

“Did you ever think of getting over it?”


There is one body, that of a large human male dressed in scraps of denim and a canary-yellow shirt emblazoned with the words SOUL ASYLUM. Nearby you find the remains of a fiberglass skateboard, its rear wheels sheared off. Brendan lingers, baffled at his doppelgänger’s choice of weapon.

Level 8: The Antechamber

From the base of the stairway a single corridor zigs and zags, then terminates in a large room, one hundred feet square, empty except for a low square altar built of stone. The only other item in the room is a skeleton wearing the gray cotton fatigues of a senior intelligence officer of the Soviet Union. It rests, propped against one wall, in a sitting position, hand extended toward the altar.

You always thought this was the bottom level, but the altar has been pushed to one side to reveal a set of stairs leading down. You check the tracking device: Mournblade is exactly five meters below you.

Level 9: Adric’s Tomb

The final level is a network of natural stone caves plainly much older than the rest of the complex. You see here the skeleton of an enormous beast, half hound and half dragon, a long row of vertebrae encircling the room.

At the rear of the room is an archway built of porphyry, which any competent mage or an associate producer who could stand to broaden his horizons a little will recollect is the primary component of any portal spell. It is sad that they know this, but they are correct—any player present will see through it to another place entirely, a random location in space and time.

Here you see Adric himself, seated on a black throne and dressed in shreds of chain mail. His skin is pearl white and his mouth sneers, even in his sleep. He is slender and beautiful and tragic, just as he is on his book covers. He is, without any doubt, what Simon looks like in his deepest, most private fantasies. At the sound of a living being on his threshold, he begins to awaken. His eyes, when opened, are green and soulful. The Artifact-class greatsword Mournblade is visible on his person.

This is the end of the Endorian Anomaly module. Any further material included is of abstract interest only. It is here that the players will die, regardless of whether they rule the galaxy and can’t believe they are being knocked off by a pissant artifact on a backwater planet in an unfashionable genre.


“So is this it?” I asked.

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Lisa said. “Simon said he’d put it in a place no one would ever find, but I didn’t understand the scheme exactly. The room runs simulated all the time, and sometimes Adric gets activated and wanders out into the world. Or an amper picks it up, maybe. So the sword is out there, and then very occasionally the wielder runs into somebody and kills them. Or the wielder dies and another creature picks it up and the rampage starts.”

“Why’s it happening more often, though?” I said.

“Simon wanted it to, I guess. He had some theory about the year 2000, how there should be some big computer failure. Probably it just checks the system clock, spawns wandering ampers more often.”

There was a scuffling sound in the corridor outside Adric’s chamber. I whipped the camera around to see what could only be a Dreadwarg, the terror of the First Age. A Dreadwarg looked like a standard wolf, but, like that of Mournblade, its palette was wiped to black.

I was at the controls. Select all Heroes, target the warg as an enemy, attack! Pren-Dahr’s blaster didn’t seem to damage it. Ley-R4 cut at it with the NightShard, but for some reason it rushed past her to attack Brendan Blackstar. It took 75 percent of his hit points in one bite, but Brendan’s riposte with the Martian blade cut it in half. A gimmicky black wolf had almost managed to kill the rulers of the galaxy. A howling noise came from the passageway outside. Perhaps they could smell the royalty in Brendan Blackstar’s blood.

I paged through the Heroes’ inventory for the first time. Nothing much, only their few weapons and useless imperial money, until I reached the weaponless Loraq, who turned out to be craftier than the rest. He possessed a number of odd items, some of which he spawned with, some of which he had looted from corpses as we passed. A Soviet-era codebook, the Tentacle of the Over-Mind (purpose unknown), and an antimatter grenade, far more powerful than anything these Iron Age f*cks had ever considered.

Purely from the point of view of gameplay, it was my option. I had him start the timer on the grenade, proceed into the corridor, and shut the door behind him. The blast was well in excess of its targets’ toughness. After a thousand millennia of shame, Loraq had found a way to give his life for his true king.

We turned to see Adric shambling toward the portal, as he had been doing for millennia. As we watched, Adric passed into the world of American finance to kill and despoil. When he passed through, a metal door closed behind him and locked. I had the Heroes try to break it with the blaster, the NightShard, and the Martian vibro-sword, all without result. On the far side, Adric would kill until the sword consumed him, and then a luckless character would pick the sword up and wield it after him, until at last the sword ran out of wielders and teleported back. In a city as dense as the AstroTrade level, the carnage would be indefinite, a building wave of panic and fiduciary bloodletting.

“Adamantium,” said Matt, looking over my shoulder. “Nothing cuts it.”

“C’mon, nothing? That’s bullshit. This is a plasma gun or some shit.”

“It’s just a rule—there had to be a thing nothing could cut so we could keep players from breaking out of the world entirely.”

“Can’t the thief pick the lock?” Don said. He pointed at Prendar. “Isn’t that a thief?”

“Uh, right,” said Matt. I set Prendar to working on it. It took about five seconds. It was a hard lock, but Prendar had been a thief since back when doors were made of stone.

“Weren’t you going to cut the thief class?” said Matt. “Something about their being useless.”

The door opened, and, as Brennan, I went through. Brennan wasn’t dressed for it, but he had a sword from the future and melee skills superior to anyone except maybe Adric himself. The door slammed shut behind me. I wouldn’t see the others again.

Beyond the portal, it was spring in Endoria the Electronic Trading Platform. I stood in a city square next to a dry fountain. It had rained recently, and there were puddles among the cobblestones, puddles that reflected the sky beautifully. Lisa had written a really, really pretty renderer.

Adric stood there, looking around for souls to drain. Around us, trading continued; with their combat instincts suppressed, the innocent dwarves, gnomes, humans, and elves would go on with their speculation and arbitrage until they picked up the cursed sword. The stage was silent. Brennan faced Adric. The vibro-sword buzzed; the black runesword moaned.

Darren got up to take my place. “I should probably do this part.”

“Let Russell do it,” Matt said. “We kinda tweaked things after you left. Added a couple of things.”

“Okay,” Darren said, but he sounded dubious, and I decided Matt was right.

One way to think about game design is in terms of verbs—what is the array of verbs available to a player? Obviously, there must be fighting, because otherwise (at least for many of us) why play a video game? But what verbs does that involve, exactly? Matt and I considered the previous game’s system too simplistic, too dumbed-down, and Don agreed. We set to work to change that.

First, we prototyped the combat system as a card game using 3-by-5-inch note cards to stand for actions. A player could choose to attack high, attack low, block high, or block low. Once the cards were turned over, a high attack against low block, or low attack against high block, dealt the most damage. Simultaneous attacks resulted in less damage. Each player had a limited supply of hit cards and block cards, so by counting cards, players could guess at each other’s strategies. Not terrible. We demonstrated it at the next company-wide meeting, to modest applause.

It wasn’t enough. I’d had a semester of saber fencing in college and had a green belt in hapkido. Matt had an extensive knowledge of the writings of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, and Michael Moorcock, plus he had seen all the Highlander films in their original theatrical release. We agreed that a really good sword fight wasn’t about just choosing one of four options. We needed panache, daring, and creativity. We needed more note cards.

We began to build out the system. What if a strike that directly followed a successful block did extra damage? Now the simple matching game acquired a new rhythm, and just a tiny element of drama. Thrust, parry… riposte!

It wasn’t enough. Encouraged, we did what any self-respecting game designer does: we added a gratuitous number of features. Forehand and backhand attacks; long-range thrusts; sweeping cuts. Directional parries, first the basics—tierce (right), quarte (left), and quinte (upward)—then prime, seconde, sixte, septime, octave. Corps-à-corps! En garde! We shared the conviction that a simulated universe that could not express these things was not a universe worth simulating.

Still, it wasn’t nearly enough. The minutiae of footing and weight changes, obviously. Stances, hit location, armor, unarmed combat, different materials. Flint ax heads shattered against metal plate. Bronze weapons could be hacked to pieces by carbon steel blades.

After ten weeks of work, we could play out an altercation between an eighteenth-century French mercenary with a short sword and buckler (a saucer-size shield with a pointed spike—as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to “metal objects designed to cause harm”) and a Roman legionnaire from the age of Marius, with his gladius, scutum, and pilum. Vae victis!

I felt the three of them watching while I tried to work through the variables in my head. I would play Brennan, a tall muscular human with high skills across the board, but he favored a heavy blade. To his disadvantage, he now held a delicate saber, light and whippy, with a fiftieth-century keenness. My opponent, Adric, I judged to be a maxed-out Scottish greatsword artist wielding a four-foot blade.

I had a great deal of speed, but he had the longer reach. I was unarmored; he wore chain mail and a fancy helmet that flattered his cheekbones. In addition, Adric was a First Age Correllean noble, which involved a long string of modifiers I didn’t know about, although I could assume it meant he was a badass. He suffered from a long-term Byronic depression, although that might not translate tactically.

Adric advanced forward without ceremony, the massive sword held out in front of him, vertical and tilted slightly back, just as it was in the Renaissance fencing manual we’d taken the moves from. When the blade descended, its moaning dopplered up and down the scale. He made three looping overhand strikes that I backed way the hell away from, because I wasn’t sure the cursed sword could be blocked at all. But I had to at least try. I blocked the third one; when the blades touched, the sound suggested a dying god impacting an electrified high-tension wire. Adric’s pale horse face kept its signature expression—the weary, sophisticated sneer of a man who has forgotten how many souls he’s taken, who pities the world that must contain him.

I ran at him and struck at him over and over, fast and sloppy, thinking to outpace him, but his defense seemed immaculate. He waited for a break, then stepped behind himself and pivoted all the way around for a low backhand. I fumbled at the keyboard for a split second, no idea what was happening, and wound up blocking in a crouch. Then Brennan wouldn’t stop crouching and shuffled around parrying until I realized the Caps Lock key was down. I wished Darren weren’t watching.

I made mistakes, but I knew the system, or I knew what to try. I slithered in and cut up Adric’s forearms. I ducked under sweeping cuts and jabbed for the belly. I started to remember the little tics of posture that led into his special attacks, and anticipated them. I nicked him a few times—his blade was unquestionably slower—but he had the hit points of a bull elephant. He had a guard stance that made him almost unhittable, a stance I let him take until I realized he was regenerating hit points. I switched stances, too, to a slightly precious-looking saber stance, body sideways, left arm tucked behind the back. I nipped hit points off of him. Brennan could do a lot of things. He had nifty forward roll and upward thrust. He had a countercut off a parry in quarte that popped back in the opponent’s face. But Adric had responses ready. I circled around Adric, and he sidestepped to cut me off. It was hard to commit to a real attack when I couldn’t risk taking even a minor cut. I had the fleeting thought that in all this, some part of me was learning a lot about game design.

Fighting games, Jared once explained to me, are about yomi. Yomi is a concept popular with game theorists, tournament-level fighting-game players, and people who like having Japanese words to throw at you. It means, literally, “reading.” Figuratively, it means understanding your own and your opponent’s options in a given situation while simultaneously knowing that your opponent knows those things, too, and then trying to predict what he will do, knowing that he may know what your prediction might be and change his mind accordingly.

Sword fighting has its yomi. There is a thing fencers call the tactical wheel—the strategic laws that decree that each attack has its own specific countermove, the way scissors beats paper, paper beats rock, rock beats scissors. Our combat system was no different, it just came with a great many more options and more ways to predict the outcome. Strong cuts committed a fighter’s weight forward; countermoves took advantage. Certain maneuvers had to be set up by a specific prerequisite move. Some attacks required a recovery phase, leaving the combatant tragically vulnerable. Every choice set up the next set of possibilities on both sides. It was a complex decision tree that both fighters were constantly trying to think their way down, down to the place where their opponent didn’t have a winning option.

Adric—I couldn’t guess how—fought as if he knew his advantage. I gave him false openings and he didn’t move. He fought as if he knew he was fighting a coward. He feinted and jabbed and played with me as I backed up, practically chasing me around the square. I really did look like a coward. I very possibly was a coward.

“Don’t forget, if he can’t recharge he’s going to die,” said Matt. I tried waiting for Mournblade to drain him, but he smoothly decapitated a passing dwarf. It flashed white, which meant another soul gone to power Mournblade’s wielder, who was now back at full strength. He could do that forever.

Lisa said, “Just kill everybody in the city and then he can’t recharge.”

“Isn’t that a little counterproductive?” I said. “Plus, Brennan can’t fight indefinitely. Not since we added the fatigue model.” And Brennan was already getting tired, fighting two-handed now. I was getting a little tired, too. “And stop helping me,” I added.

Brennan started to do his “I am very fatigued” animations. He panted; he staggered when blocked. I tried to rest him by getting out of range; when I did, he’d lower his sword and let the point drag on the ground.

Meanwhile, I was trying to yomi Simon’s own AI, even though everyone knew Simon was smarter than I was and had always been smarter than I was. I could feel—with an inner certainty—that everyone wanted me to give somebody else the controls. Darren, a world-class player who would already have taken Adric’s head off. Matt, who knew the system and the entire world better than I did. Lisa, who understood what was happening and why, and whose nerve wasn’t going to break.

But I knew that Adric would live forever, a walking curse on the world. That was his story. He was a loner, an outcast, an eternal, pretentiously sad fantasy douche bag. Simon had already written his story for him and given him the AI and the devastating magic sword to make it happen. There had to be a way out of that story. That’s why we had video games, which were an enormous amount of trouble to make. So you could do that.

I wasn’t going to win inside the tactical wheel. Screw the tactical wheel. Endorian Anomaly enabled all the game functions, all that code kicking around. I could probably play golf in there if I wanted to, not that that seemed productive. I backed up and watched Adric advance to keep me in range.

Then I turned and ran, sheathing my sword as I went. Probably people were yelling at me, but I didn’t listen. Why should I? The sun had almost set, turning the puddles gold and orange and purple. It seemed just right, the last moments of a warm evening before it gets chilly and you think of going home. It was, in fact, an excellent moment to shred.

Yes, my board had no back wheels, but not all the moves needed them. In point of fact, the lack of back wheels just made me more hard-core. I reached the fountain and tried a little minigrind, balancing on the board as it slid along the rim. It worked just fine. In fact, the camera even knew to run a 180-degree pan to show off the move—which, incidentally, revealed that Adric was closing in, runesword ready to strike. Brennan landed and transitioned, prepping the move I had in mind. It was one of those moments when you’re good enough to forget there’s even a controller. I got into the handplant, feet up, one hand on the rim, and the point of view revolved around me to catch the setting sun, a beautifully thoughtful piece of programming. I triggered the second stage, and Brendan whipped his sword out with his free hand. As he came down, he swept it in a showy circle. It even did the sound effect, a surf-guitar sting and a deep-voiced, heavy-reverb roar as the true king struck home.

ENDORIAN ANOMALY:

GAME MASTER’S SUPPLEMENT

1) If Adric is killed and the game is saved out, a new version of the world-state will be exported and further playthroughs of all WAFFLE games will include the Tomb of Destiny in its revised state. In games that import this state, Adric will no longer be a character in the Black Arts universe, and Mournblade will no longer menace this or any other world, ever (note that these effects may be reversed by the use of the Wish, Limited Wish, or Resurrection spell. We’re just saying).

2) Adric’s inventory contains the following items, available upon his death:

a) An antique suit of chain mail

b) 495,000 gold pieces, contained in (one assumes) a Bag of Holding

c) The First Age Artifact-class greatsword named Mournblade (+10 to hit, ignores dodge attempts, force fields, intangibility, and other varieties of magical, technological, and psychic protection. Successful hit destroys target creature or object with no possibility of resurrection; Mournblade’s wielder receives bonus hit points equal to the target’s at time of death. Wielder invulnerable to sorceries, enchantments, glamours, conjurations. Hit points decrement by 5% each minute held. Once wielded, Mournblade cannot be dropped).

d) A crown, but you find it is not the one you expected, not the Crown of Winter at all. It’s the Crown of Summer. It is, quite simply, the last crown anybody in Endoria really, truly cared about, but you forgot that, didn’t you? What it felt like when the long summer ended and you had to go home to the life you planned for yourself, the one that didn’t work out the way you planned. But for a brief moment the crown existed, to honor the King of KidBits Camp for Young Achievers for 1983. [“He wanted you to have it,” Lisa whispered to Darren. “He really did.”]

e) Finally, there is the secret of the ultimate game, inscribed on a series of crumbling scrolls in a language that is no longer well understood. But partial translations suggest that the secret of the ultimate game is that you’re already in the ultimate game, all the time, forever. That the secret of the ultimate game is that the ultimate game is a paradox, because there’s no way to play a game without knowing you’re playing it. That games are already awesome, or else why are we making such a fuss? That the secret of the ultimate game is that at the very least we’re going to have voice recognition and 3-D body-sensing interfaces and augmented reality and generated narrative and, really, much better writing, and that it would help if people would just notice that it’s going to be pretty f*cking great. And the secret is also that you’ve always been fatally slow on the uptake, and that you’re sitting with a girl who is smarter than you and almost anyone else you’ve ever met, and that she’s spent eighteen months in your company without completely despising you, and in fact was willing to stay up till four in the morning with you watching you play a video game, and that it would help to be a little more relaxed about things.

Or the secret is that in the winters when the snow fell deep enough, ten-year-old Simon used to take his family’s one battered pair of cross-country skis from the chilly, oil-smelling basement, painstakingly wedge his feet into the plastic boots, clamp them in, and set off awkwardly up the snow-covered street, sweating already, breathing hard into the scarf wrapped across his face, pom-pom of his blue-and-gray wool hat swaying. The snow was still falling, still only two or three inches deep, and the skis grated on asphalt every few yards. He would turn off the road along a path into the woods, and scrubby maple and birch would give in to tall white pines, and he’d reach the thin strip of cleared, undeveloped land along the power lines. They marched in a line across his neighborhood, through forests and behind backyards, the tallest structures for miles, arrow-straight, and then across the highway and north to parts unknown, Canada and then the North Pole, a dimly imagined winter country of villages and wolves that he’d envision until the snow turned blue and pink in the sunset—whatever was at the end of the line of metal pylons and humming crackling wire. A few years later, he’d be coming back with Darren and his older brother and his friends to learn to get drunk on summer nights and, as long as the weather held, in fall. And on some nights Simon learned to code in his garage, but on others they laughed and threw empty green and brown beer bottles at the rocks. Even when they were ten the halos of sparkling brown glass were already a constant feature, spreading out from those same rocks among the pine needles and dead grass, as if they had been deposited there by the glaciers as they melted rather than left there by the previous wave of Rush-shirted teenage boys and the ones before that, all having the same conversations about friendship and music and the ultimate game in whatever form it takes and their a*shole parents and all other matters of consequence that lie between the Second Age and the Fourth and beyond, all things then known to elves and men.