“Of course this isn’t happening.” Josiah was standing about twenty feet from Roland on a perfectly flat, perfectly still stretch of sand. He sounded bored. “How could any of this be happening? You must be going mad. It’s the only reasonable explanation.”
Mel stood and held out a hand to Freddy. Unsteadily, Freddy tottered to her feet. The landscape was twirling around in dizzying circles. “I’m going to throw up,” said Mel in thoughtful tones.
“No,” said Freddy, forcing the words out past the pain. “Stop looking at it. Come on.”
They struggled over towards Roland. “Oh, you can’t do that,” said Josiah.
Roland followed his gaze. “Yes, they can. Freddy, roll a d20 for initiative.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“You said GM and NPC! You’ve got me thinking in those terms! I can’t help it!” he said frantically. “You can sign! How can you?”
They needed to have a conversation. There was way too much for them to say to each other. They couldn’t have a conversation now. She shrugged impatiently. “Okay, yeah, right, never mind. You’re the storyteller. They’re the story. Stop letting them control you!” she screamed over the rising wind. They had reached him now. The sand swirled up around them, vicious and stinging.
“Spot check. Spot check,” said Mel, pointing. Josiah was wandering towards them. Where he stepped, the heaving desert went calm. The sky was turning to knives somewhere above.
“You’re not a storyteller,” said, and signed, Josiah. He hadn’t raised his voice, but it came clear and loud above the wind. He had cleared the air in front of him so Roland could see him signing. “You have one function only. You know you get into trouble when you listen to Freddy.” Freddy thought it was a mistake. When Cuerva Lachance and Josiah tried to work at the same time, they cancelled each other out.
Freddy grasped Roland by the shoulders, spun him around, and hollered right into his face, “You should have been listening to me all along. You’re giving them too much power! You created them!”
He stared at her. “I never.”
“Thousands and thousands of years ago,” said Freddy. “You told a story, and they were born. It was a story about how the world was created, so you gave them a lot of power, but they were still yours. They’ve always been yours! Life after life, they convince you you’re Three, and the choice makes you seem … third. Less important. They’re just stories, Roland!”
“The stories are killing us,” Mel pointed out. “Somebody needs to do something before we drown in impossible sand.”
“There’s nothing you can do except make the choice.” Josiah was very close now. Roland wasn’t looking at him.
“I can’t do it. I just make role-playing games. I’m the wrong person. They’re far more powerful than I am,” said Roland, tears spilling from his eyes.
She shook him. “You stupid idiot,” she shouted, trying to ignore the sand scraping her throat. There was no use in shouting at Roland, who would have understood to the same degree if she had whispered, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Do you know how many times I’ve met you, all through history? You’ve been leaders and poets and all kinds of things, and you’ve always been more powerful than you thought. You were Bragi Boddason. You were Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for crying out loud!”
Roland, trembling, looked to Mel for help. “You know,” she said, “the pleasure-dome guy.”
Roland gulped. “I … I was him? I don’t…”
“You were him,” said Freddy.
“I remember that poem,” said Roland. “I used it.”
“Well, use it again.”
“Really, really quickly,” Mel added, “pretty please.”
Josiah had reached them. “Stop this nonsense,” he said, laying a hand on Roland’s shoulder. But Roland couldn’t hear him.
Roland said:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
The pleasure-dome built itself across the sky.
It was crystal, Freddy thought: a strange, impossible multifaceted crystal sparkling into existence in the middle of the sandstorm. It cut off the wind. Cuerva Lachance yelped and slid down off the rock, her trench coat torn to tatters by the storm she had herself been stirring up. The few remaining rags of the coat fluttered down onto the sand. But the sand was going, too. Freddy felt grass springing up beneath her feet. Hedges, half wild, half cultivated, erupted out of the ground and wove themselves into mazes. Josiah was knocked aside by one, dragged away into greenery. The crystal dome turned the air to rainbows.
Freddy saw her bag lying not far from her on the grass. She picked it up. “Stop this,” said Josiah from somewhere in the middle of a bush.
“I like it. It’s pretty,” said Cuerva Lachance. “I’m still generally opposed, you understand.”
“Mel, don’t forget you’re a cleric,” said Roland, watching Freddy pull the microgun out of her bag. “Freddy, I think you’d better be a fighter.”
“This is game stuff, is it?” said Freddy. “What does a fighter do?”
“A fighter fights,” said Mel. “I have magical powers, but I haven’t got any spells prepared. But, I mean … is this really going to work?”
“I say it is. It’s my story. Use the spells you had prepared for our next session,” said Roland.
“You’re thinking too logically,” said Freddy, cocking the gun.
“No,” said Roland. “The game has rules. I think stories do, too.”
“But—”
Mel cut her off. “He’s right. There needs to be a mixture. If we’re too logical about this, we let Josiah in. If we cut too many corners, we let in Cuerva Lachance.”
Freddy opened her mouth to protest, but then, oddly, she saw Roland as she had always seen him: as someone neat and messy at the same time, someone who put everything in order but threw it into chaos simultaneously. He had always been a mixture. It still didn’t entirely make sense to her, but maybe he was right. They needed to treat this as a story, and stories had structure and creativity. They couldn’t just throw random bits of plot around and hope they did something useful.
“They’re NPCs,” said Roland. Freddy thought he was talking to himself. “Just NPCs…”
“Not truly,” said Cuerva Lachance, floating across the ground towards them. “We’ve become very real over the millennia. You lost control of us long ago. I think it’s fantastic.”
“We built our own rules to compensate,” said Josiah. He was still trying to fight free of his bush, so Roland couldn’t see him. Mel signed a translation. “We do better that way.”
“Yeah,” said Freddy, “and you basically convince all the Threes that they’re your … well, that they’re your thralls. Don’t you?”
“Why shouldn’t we?” said Josiah, his voice clipped and sharp. “Why should we be their thralls? That’s what you’re trying to make happen, isn’t it? I won’t be turned into a puppet!”
He tumbled free of the bush, rolling out onto the grass. “I should have thought you would understand,” he spat straight at Freddy. “You lived in our house for weeks. You saw them.”
Mel and Roland turned to look at her. “You saw who?” said Mel.