Chronicle Worlds: Feyland Read online

  They didn’t call it the King Tiger for nothing.

  “Well,” I said to Joshua as the tank’s barrel lowered ominously towards us. “Go on then, why don’t you hit it with your sword?”

  Boom.

  GAME OVER

  Sigh. I took off my helmet. My nose was bleeding again; this one was the worst. Twin trickles of blood ran down my face, I could feel them. I pulled off my gloves and as I went to wipe it away, my fingernail broke off.

  I stared at it for a moment. It had come right off my index finger. The fingernails on my other hands were blackened and bruised, as though they, too, might simply jump away at a moment’s pressure.

  What were we doing? Why did we keep playing?

  “Joshua?” I said, turning the broken nail over in between my thumb and forefinger. “I think it’s time we called a medical team.”

  He shook his head. “And tell them what? Some dead alien is inside our video games, leeching away our life force?”

  I didn’t think the Queen was an alien—I had no idea what she was, actually—but Joshua was right. I knew it. Not in the logical way, like I knew how much frontal armour that Königstiger had. I knew it in my heart.

  “Maybe they can help,” I said, stubborn as ever.

  “Maybe they can lock us up for being crazy.”

  Yeah, yeah.

  “Okay,” I said. “One more game, and then I’m calling the med team.”

  “One more game,” said Joshua, and we loaded from our last save point.

  * * *

  Once again we dismounted, but this time I swapped my canteen for the anti-tank grenade. I was so tired and sick I didn’t say goodbye to the crew, or complain about the realism issues.

  My life was on the line. I didn’t care about historical accuracy anymore.

  Joshua, Nemtsev and I trudged through the snow, following the same path we’d taken before. I cradled the anti-tank grenade in my hands, ready to throw it.

  Right on cue, the forest began to shake and, from the treeline, burst the Königstiger. I tossed the grenade and—on my first try!—it struck the commander’s hatch, attached magnetically, and detonated.

  Smoke poured from the tank’s barrel and then, with a blast that blew all three of us over into the snow, the tank became a roaring inferno.

  “Nice throw,” said Joshua. “Much better than a sword.”

  “No kidding,” I said, watching the tank burn with a morbid fascination. Soon its ammunition would start to ignite. We didn’t want to be here when that happened.

  What now? I glanced down the road. The lights of the village were close, and we had to move. But this tank hadn’t come here for no reason…

  Over the crackle of the fire and the popping of burning ammunition, I heard something else. A woman’s voice, echoing from the trees.

  She was singing.

  Calling to us.

  “This way,” I said, pressing the stock of the PPSh to my shoulder and, with the glow of the burning tank in the background, made my way into the thick pine trees.

  We followed the singing, a dark, haunting melody that seemed to be both thin and distant and yet closer than I could possibly imagine. The words were indistinct, if it even had any, more akin to the ringing of tiny bells than any language I knew.

  Maybe she was an alien.

  After only a minute or so, we came across a clearing surrounded by low bushes. In the centre of the clearing was a strange woman in a green dress made of leaves. There was something off about her: her eyes were too big, her mouth too small, and she had little fangs that poked out from her lips. She would have been cute, almost, if she wasn’t trying to murder us.

  The biggest difference, and the biggest hint that she was not human, was the pair of thin, shimmering butterfly wings sprouting from her back. She was hovering a foot or so off the ground, at the centre of a circle of stones, thin wings humming so fast they created a rainbow in the air. Strange runes were carved into the snow. They glowed a faint cyan.

  No need to guess who that was. “You ready?” I said to Joshua, keeping my voice low.

  “Yup.” He even had his safety off and everything. “Weird how she expected us to be here, but doesn’t seem to care that we are.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was pretty creeped out. Maybe he was just as creeped out as I was. Trying to distance himself from it all.

  “Be careful when you attack,” said Nemtsev. “Shards are dangerous. Use all your might to bring her down quickly, before she ensorcells you with her siren song.”

  “I thought the Sirens were Greek,” I said, trying to make her smile.

  She didn’t. “It is a metaphor.”

  Right. No jokes. I pulled back the bolt on my gun and chambered a round. “Let’s do this,” I said, and I stood up, pushing past the low growth.

  The Queen saw me. Looked at me with my own eyes, her face so familiar, and yet so different.

  “Cassie!” she said, her voice alarmed, as though we had interrupted something critical. “You don’t—”

  I shot her right in the chest.

  The Queen slumped in a bloody heap, red blood splashing over the snow, clear and crimson against the white.

  I lowered my rifle. “That was… easy?”

  “Congratulations,” said Nemtsev, her smile wide like a half moon. “You have surpassed all my wildest expectations of you!”

  Cautiously, I approached the dead body. It seemed vaguely out of place in the sim, too detailed. Too living. Too real. I gave it a prod with the barrel of my gun.

  Definitely dead.

  “I still feel like crap,” I said. “How long is it going to take before…”

  And then I noticed something. Something I should have noticed a lot sooner. But I was tired. Sick. Relieved.

  The blood was red.

  Slowly, I turned around, and I saw Nemtsev. A sword of light sprung out from her palm, the light of it basking the stones in a pallid, cold radiance.

  “It was you,” I said, the truth slowly dawning on me. “It was you, all along. There is no Queen.”

  “Of course not,” spat Nemtsev. “Dead and gone, bones and dust. But there are other evils in this world that crave life.” Her smile widened, her teeth elongating into sharp spines. “Shards are very, very real… and you, little Cassie, have just eliminated my only remaining rival. Everything you’ve done, every battle you’ve fought, has only been to aid me.”

  I levelled my gun at her. So did Joshua. “That’s what you think,” I said, and I pulled the trigger.

  Click. Nothing. Out of bullets. How? I had only fired a single shot.

  “How easily this world is manipulated,” said Nemtsev, her voice almost purring. “Something taken, something added.”

  Slowly Nemtsev melted away. The face of the NPC disappeared, and in its place was a woman in a shimmering golden dress. She seemed familiar, and I realised with a start that she looked like some kind of hybrid of Joshua and me. She had his dark skin lightened by my own, Joshua’s slender arms married to my broad shoulders. My hips and Joshua’s legs. Her face looked like someone had used a computer algorithm to blend the two of us together; simultaneously each of us, and neither of us.

  Like our child. Gross.

  “Okay,” I said, throwing my useless weapon down into the snow. “So what now? You kill us with that thing?”

  “In time,” said Nemtsev, eyeing me like someone might a hunk of delicious meat. “Once I have finished draining your essence. Then, when you are both hollow shells, you will die and I shall be whole again.”

  “What if I just log out?”

  The notion seemed to amuse her. “Try it. The time it will take you to walk back here will only make me stronger.”

  “So,” I said, “what do you want?”

  The wind picked up around us. “I want to offer you a deal,” she said, her tone almost sultry. “Join me. Share your mortal essence with me, willingly. Allow me to return to life, and I will spare Joshua.”

&n
bsp; Joshua and I exchanged a look. His avatar seemed fit and healthy, but I knew the person behind it couldn’t be. Right at that moment, he slumped over in the snow.

  “Or,” said Nemtsev, “watch him die before your very eyes.”

  “Joshua!” I ran over to his side. He lay there, eyes open, black blood dribbling from his nose. I gave him a rough shake. Nothing.

  I almost took off my helmet, but Joshua was my only friend. I couldn’t let him die like this.

  “Do you promise?” I said. “If I help you, will you save Joshua?”

  Her smile, full of shark teeth, grew wide. “I swear it,” she said, casually pricking the tip of her finger with her light-sword. Black ichor ran down the ghostly blade. “On my own blood.”

  Options. I had none. Gritting my teeth, I nodded. “If you will save Joshua, I will help you.”

  The notion seemed to please her greatly. She laughed—a noise like a bunch of screws in a metal can—and a strange light grew in her eyes. “Then give me your hand, and let the bond be complete.” Nemtsev walked towards me, hands extended, fingers elongating into filthy claws. Grasping for me, reaching…

  I snatched up Joshua’s sword and slashed it across Nemtsev’s body.

  For a moment she didn’t react. Just stared at me, mouth open. Then a thin black line grew from her chest, starting from her hip and travelling up to her right arm.

  “I guess swords are useful after all,” I said, as Nemtsev fell forward into the snow, a slowly growing black stain spreading out from her body.

  Joshua gasped and, as though someone had shocked him with a thousand volts, sat bolt upright.

  And then I felt it. A surge of power so raw and intense it hurt my bones. It travelled down my left arm, my sword arm, right to my heart. Pain and strength, the feeling of a good workout times a thousand. Whatever Nemtsev had taken was returned, and then some, by some process I couldn’t begin to understand.

  Then it was gone and I felt, for the first time since I’d logged into Soviet Storm, perfectly normal.

  Nemtsev’s body melted away, like wax into a flame. It turned into a puddle of black liquid, staining the snow, and then it burst into a million tiny dead butterflies.

  “Cassie?” said a voice. I thought, for a moment, that it was Nemtsev somehow alive again, but instead the strange faerie I had shot had sat up, her wound healed.

  “Yes?” I asked, somewhat hesitantly. I wished I hadn’t dropped the sword.

  The Shard held up her hands. “Please, wait. I mean you no harm.”

  That was a claim I was going to be sceptical of. “Prove it.”

  She seemed confused by the request, but showed me the red blood still splattered on the snow. “I am not your enemy. I am the Golden Shard.”

  “You’re not going to try and steal my… immortal essence, or whatever?”

  The Golden Shard smiled. “No, child. I too seek a return to the living, but I will accomplish my return by good deeds, and by taking only that which is offered freely; it is far more powerful than stolen life, after all.”

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “I won’t—”

  She held up her hand. “But that is a long term goal. For now, I am satisfied with this victory. I have spent the last year trying to defeat the Gossamer Shard, but she proved… elusive.”

  “Okay,” I said, not sure what else to say. “So she’s really gone?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The Gossamer Shard has been banished to another realm.”

  “Another realm?” I looked at the bloody stain on the snow. “She was supposed to die.”

  “If only things were so simple,” said the Golden Shard. “She will move on, substantially weakened, to another game… and there I will hunt her.”

  “Great,” I said. I took a deep breath. “So… am I free to go?”

  “Yes,” said the Golden Shard, her eyes fixed on me curiously. “Go now, Cassie and Joshua. I hope I never have need of your particular skills again.”

  “Believe me,” said Joshua, “I think I speak for us both when I say we’re okay with that.”

  I brought up the menu and, with a final look at the Golden Shard, I logged out. The moment the menu came up, the stress flowed out of my body like water.

  What a day.

  * * *

  I took a moment to breathe and try and steady myself. It was over. Done. Complete. The Gossamer Shard was still out there, infecting some other game, and…

  That wasn’t my problem at all. Not even in the slightest. Still, I needed to go home and change, and have a shower, and generally try to process what had happened. Then, I guessed, it was time for school.

  I’d been up all night, so I wasn’t sure what the point was.

  “So,” said Joshua, casually leaning up against my sim chair. He gave me a playful smile. “What do you want to play next?”

  I made a fist. He laughed.

  “Just kidding,” he said, jumping away.

  With a groan I eased myself out of the sim chair. My legs felt like I’d run a mile, but strangely, I wasn’t anywhere near as tired as I thought I’d be.

  “No more games for a while,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  Together, we stumbled out of the sim-café and into the daylight. We were definitely going to be late for school; the mundane-ness of it made me laugh. Education. It was almost a relief, having to deal with something that wasn’t sucking out my very soul—arguable, in the case of school—and where I wasn’t trying to fight my way across a simulated version of the USSR.

  With a renewed energy in my step, I followed Joshua to his grav-car, and when I finally sat down, I was glad we’d succeeded. We’d earned a day of normality followed by the world’s most relaxing night’s sleep.

  But, despite all these comforting thoughts, I couldn’t shake the vague feeling I was being watched.

  A Word from David Adams

  I’m a life-long video gamer. The amount of /played I have on my World of Warcraft account is a little concerning (pretty sure I’m at about a year in total, all things considered). I’m 31 right now but I’ve been playing video games since I was 3.

  So when I had an opportunity to write in the universe of Feyland, I was pretty excited. At the time of writing my addiction of choice was World of Tanks, and it totally doesn’t show in “The Gossamer Shard” at all.

  Not even a little bit.

  I read Feyland some years ago, and when I did I was always curious about other games. What happened if the fey creatures started leaking into other worlds? Affecting other lives? So when I saw that there was an opportunity to be, in a peripheral way, a part of that world, I leapt at the chance.

  “The Gossamer Shard” is a bit of a love note to a few things. It’s a love note to the obsessives who get really into their games and drown in the stories of them, it’s a love note to the number crunchers who simply pick the most effective builds and options and don’t care about the lore, and finally, it’s a love note to Feyland and a lifetime of gaming.

  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I, really sincerely and genuinely, enjoyed writing it.

  http://www.amazon.com/David-Adams/e/B006S1GSXI

  The Glitchy Goblin

  by K. J. Colt

  BABBLING BROOKS, the kind that flow between grassy plains and splash happily onto pebbles and rocks, are deceptively obnoxious. Their only purpose—other than providing life-sustaining water to the Dusk Vale and Bright Realm creatures—was to lecture magical beings on their life choices. And their incessant liquidy adages were maddening. Splash splash. “Tall oaks grow from little acorns,” they’d say. Splash, plop. “Young idler, old beggar.”

  Only magic folk were subjected to their never-ending life lessons, so when the fourth wiry layer of black hair finally grew up between the soft down on my gigantic feet—signalling my ascension from hob youngling to hob adulthood—I left my dull village of Hobton in the Dusk Vale, also home to my irritating siblings, and carried my warty frog, Croaker, towards my new life a
s an apprentice healer in the Bright Court.

  How much has changed since then. Sitting now by a fire beside a Dark Realm swamp, listening to mud-spirit bubbles pop-scream on the rotting surface, made me wish for the lecturing brooks of the Bright Realm. Who knew that swamps were worse? They’re nothing but grumbling, stinking sissy ponds. And it wasn’t just the smells of death that reeked, but their attitudes, too. As hot, talking vapours pushed up through liquid dirt, they depressed me with their philosophising.

  “Dead men tell no tales,” they hissed through their stink. “As a man is born, he also begins to die.”

  “The only curse in life is a bad attitude,” I shouted back feebly, and then got to my feet and stormed off into the dark. Along the way, I plucked lunar mushrooms off ghost trees, gobbled them up, and then used my tongue to pick the stringy bits out from between my molars.

  “Ugh,” I said. Hobs ate meat and vegetables, but we always cooked our food. There was none of this raw, carnivorous flesh eating that Dark Realm beasts were prone to. The relentless competition for raw flesh meant small animals were scarce, and large animals… well, to be fair, most animals are larger than me. I’m a midget.

  I rubbed my hand down my tattered, ragged tunic and sighed at the starved, flat stomach beneath it. With arms as fragile as twigs and legs as bony as skeletons, death for me was a weekly occurrence.

  Ever since the Bright King banished me from the Bright Realm—the devil—I’d been struggling to escape this nocturnal hell. The Bright King had the intelligence of a drunken troll: dumb, but not dumb enough.

  In the Realm of Faerie, we don’t have chocolate. Chocolate is powerful. Anything that delights, excites, and satisfies has power. After becoming a powerful Bright Court healer and tending to the Bright King’s various afflictions, I was sent by the king himself to the human world to gather additional medicinal knowledge.