Chronicle Worlds: Feyland Read online

  Sam stayed inside his penthouse apartment for several months, where he did nothing at all except spend his money and play Feyland over and over. He put on weight and grew pale and flabby. One night Fay came to him and held up a baby boy who had her blonde hair and blue eyes. “My son,” she said. When Sam stretched out his arms to hold them both, they moved far away. He woke up in darkness. The wound in his chest twitched.

  * * *

  In the meantime, the troubles between Lenna and her parents had solved themselves. Or rather, Lenna had figured out a way to make it seem as if they had.

  Out of the blue, she announced to her parents that she intended to be a better person. That day she began a diet to lose weight and to use her parents’ exercise machines. She colored her hair a pretty shade of red and let her mother instruct her on the use of makeup. Using her mother’s charge card, she bought a lot of new clothes. She brought up her grades. Although she didn’t want ever to become too popular—popularity was a nuisance when you had better things on your mind—she grew into a role as a well-liked, if somewhat mysterious, girl.

  For all these things, she asked only one condition: that she could play Feyland whenever she wanted. “I know it’s just a game,” she said to her parents, smiling almost invisibly.

  * * *

  Sam moved into a one-room apartment in a high-rise for single low-income people. With the last of his money, he bribed the owner of a sim cafe to take him on as a helper (read: waiter-janitor-customer service guy). The owner ran his sim cafe according to the motto “The customer is always right.” That suited Sam fine. “Yessir, Nossir, Yes’m, No’m,” he said all day, never varying his tone. Customers asked rude questions and made absurd demands. These things did not bother him. In fact, it pleased him to delegate responsibility for being right. He had never been right about anything in his entire life.

  Employees of the sim café could use the gaming equipment in off-hours. After a double shift of customer insults and tiresome work, Sam sat down to play Feyland in the small hours of the morning. As he worked through the levels of the game, so familiar now, he remembered the beautiful world to which he could no longer return. The Dark Queen had cursed him with exile, and she seemed unlikely to break her promise.

  Weariness overcame him, and he fell into troubled sleep without moving from where he sat. In a dream, Fay came to him.

  “Sam Sammish,” she said. “You do not need to play Feyland to go on a quest. You are on one now. Choose to admit it. Will you meet the challenges and solve the riddles? I cannot undo the Dark Queen’s curse, but if you live with honor and humility, you will see me again.”

  Sam woke up and looked around the dark, empty café. This is the current level of my quest, he thought.

  He walked home in the dim light of a new day. As he approached his high rise, he saw in the shadows an elderly woman carrying two bulging plastic bags. What is she doing out at this hour? he wondered. One of the bags ripped, spilling boxes and cans of food onto the sidewalk. Sam ran to her side and helped gather up the groceries.

  “Where do you live?” he asked, hoping she had a home.

  The woman pointed at the high rise.

  “In that place?” Sam said. “I live there, too.”

  “I was at the food bank,” she said. “If you get there later than four in the morning, all the good things are gone.”

  In a flash, Sam saw how it was for this old woman: She had to force her tired bones out of bed in the middle of the night so she could eat. Yet she was still in the game, playing with all the strength that remained to her. He could not think of anything to say for a moment.

  “What’s your name?” he finally asked.

  “Marina Fluvanna,” she said.

  “My name is Sam Sammish.”

  Marina looked up at him with a glint of amusement in her eyes. “You had that vid show,” she said.

  “Not anymore,” Sam said.

  “Good,” Marina said.

  Sam put all the boxes and cans in the remaining unbroken bag and carried it in both arms. The bag was heavy. He did not know how Marina had walked as far as she had with all those groceries.

  At the security door of the high rise, Marina fumbled for the correct code. She pulled at the door with both hands, leaning against its heavy weight as if trying to get a sailboat to come about in a high wind.

  “Wait,” said Sam. “I’ll help you.” He set down the bag and opened the door. He and Marina walked through the labyrinthine maze that led to the bank of elevators. They shot up to the thirtieth floor and walked another maze to get to Marina’s tiny cell, smaller by half than Sam’s. She was the first resident Sam had ever talked to. He often went a week without even seeing another resident.

  “Do you want some coffee?” Marina asked. There was no mistaking the hopefulness in her voice. Sam did not want coffee, but he said yes. She boiled water on an electric plate and added a spoonful of instant coffee to each of two dingy white cups, one with a chipped rim. Sam noticed she took the chipped cup for herself. She punched holes in a small can of milk and poured the milk into a little flowered pitcher. She served him a slice of white toast with “berry” jam that tasted violently of sweetener and chemicals.

  “What I would like before I die,” Marina said, looking dreamily into her coffee cup, “is to taste real cream again.”

  After he had drunk the coffee and eaten the toast, Sam said he had to do some errands. In an hour, he returned from a 24-hour grocery with three pints of cream, two new coffee mugs, a loaf of freshly baked French bread, a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, and strawberry jam labeled “100% fruit.” Marina’s jaw dropped.

  “Not needed,” she said, even though she eyed the food hungrily.

  “Yes, needed,” Sam said. In his own apartment, which seemed suddenly spacious, he thought, I’ve completed my first task: I got cream for Marina Fluvanna.

  He considered his situation. His job was terrible, but he could not quit because he needed what little money it provided. Maybe that did not matter. He flashed back to the sight of the sliver of his mortal essence twisting and turning in the Dark Queen’s crystal sphere. He had been surprised it had colors. He had been surprised he had a mortal essence. But Fay had seen. Fay had known.

  She had said that she would return if he performed his tasks with honor. When she came again, he wanted her to smile and say, “Level up, Sam. Level up.”

  A Word from Lindsay Edmunds

  One day several months ago, I saw Samuel Peralta’s Facebook post about a new series called Chronicle Worlds and knew at once I wanted to be part of it. I loved the premise behind Anthea Sharp’s Feyland series: What if a computer game was a gateway to the Realm of Faerie?

  I was not intimidated by the prospect of playing in another writer’s fictional universe. Instead, I was delighted. Feyland was a marvelous gift: a highly detailed, intricate place full of color and magic. Everything I needed was already there.

  My story, “The Skeptic,” is about a professional debunker named Sam Sammish. He enters Feyland to mock and sneer at it, which turns out to be unwise. The story was fun to write.

  In 2011, I self-published my first book, Cel & Anna, about a computer that spontaneously develops consciousness and falls in love with its owner. That book was followed by tales of good and evil e-beasts roaming the internet (Warning: Something Else Is Happening), a mother and daughter bound by a shared gift of psychic power (Blood Psychics), and a young girl who seeks adventure in the world outside her gated utopian community (New Sun Rising: Ten Stories).

  For a long time, I kept thinking up complicated explanations for what I write. These confused everyone, and eventually I wised up. Here’s what I do: I write fairy tales for the internet age. I’ve done it from the beginning.

  Cel the computer is an elf. The good and evil e-beasts are faerie tribes. The young girl’s utopian home, where ghosts are commonplace and spirituality saturates the very air, is a type of fairyland. I grew up loving fairy tales and wrote
my thesis on Emily Dickinson’s use of fantasy in her poetry. It is logical I ended up where I have.

  Fiction writing is my part-time job. (My full-time job is as an editor working with medical/scientific researchers for whom English is a second language.) I believe in regular hours, practice, and structure. A wild imagination is not much good, I discovered, until it is tame enough to be ridden.

  Take a look at my website. Subscribe to my newsletter while you are there. You will get a free Imagination ebook with great quotes and beautiful images. The first quote is from Albert Einstein. (Who knew he loved fairy tales?) The images come from several sources. Some are photos I took at the Chautauqua Institution, a western New York summer community.

  http://www.lindsayedmunds.com

  The Sword of Atui

  by Eric Kent Edstrom

  SYSTEM TEMPERATURE ALARM: 85°C

  The pop-up alert covered Fasster's terminal window, interrupting the flow of code streaming from his fingers and into his clunky old keyboard.

  He muttered a few choice curses and pushed away from the 32 inch flatscreen wired into his system. The Feyland game mod he was writing would have to wait until the system cooled. That's what you got for over-clocking your rig. But since Dad wouldn’t spring for an updated system and a thirteen-year-old couldn’t earn enough money mowing lawns to buy one, that’s just how it was.

  The temperature alarm couldn’t have come at a worse time. He was so close to finishing his mod he could taste it.

  There was only one solution.

  With a grunt he yanked open his bedroom window. The blade edge of winter sliced into his second story bedroom, stinging his face. A rustle of leaves curled across the back yard like waves piling on a distant shore. Farther off, the neighbor's swaybacked mare whinnied in the darkness, probably to warn off Fasster's errant hound Nodo.

  Beneath those sounds was silence. Far in the distance, the sky glowed amber from the lights of Milwaukee.

  Fasster called for Nodo to come home, and began pulling on warmer clothes. The only good thing about the chill Wisconsin winter was that it supplied a free source of cooling for his straining gaming rig.

  * * *

  The box fan in the window rattled and complained, blasting frosty air into Fasster’s bedroom from outside. Now bundled in long underwear, wool sweater, winter parka, and wool socks, he had to breathe on his fingers every few minutes to keep them from going numb. But the cold air had greatly improved his system’s performance.

  The system temperature now hovered at 78°C. Well within operating limits.

  Nodo, exhausted and panting from his adventures harassing the neighbor’s horse, was curled under Fasster’s desk. The dog’s body would keep Fasster’s feet nice and toasty.

  Now he could install his newest mod into his sim system and go into the game. The gloves and helmet would keep him warm enough. He hoped. Once inside, he wouldn't know if his body was getting frostbite or not.

  He prepared the code file for his mod.

  SwAtui.xlc

  The trick now was to get it on a Feyland server without the anti-virus wardens noticing. In his favor was the fact that his mod file was not, in fact, a virus. It was a game object. A sword. His plan to get it installed was so simple, he was amazed nobody else had thought of it.

  He entered the commands, fingers flying across his keyboard in a blur. It came down to this: he sent an email to a Feyland customer support rep. But this was not just any CSR, this lady was a high-level developer whose own system was always logged into the Feyland administrative backdoor. That was key.

  Fasster’s email contained a link to a screenshot of an error message. But when she clicked on it, the link would run a bit of executable code in the background to install the SwAtui.xlc file on the Feyland servers.

  If things went as planned, she'd never notice.

  Once he invoked the mod, Fasster's character would conquer the entirely of Feyland. If he had been old enough to grow a long mustache, he would have twisted it while he laughed with malicious glee. As it was, he stroked the peach fuzz on his upper lip and chuckled.

  The code would fire him a message as soon as it executed, so all he had to do now was wait.

  Fasster hit the bathroom, ate a candy bar, and sucked down a can of energy drink. He tiptoed downstairs to make sure Dad wasn’t going to interrupt him. Finally some good luck. The old man was conked out on the sofa, a late night talk show blaring on the TV. Pretty much where he’d been ever since Mom had moved out two months ago.

  By the time he’d returned to his freezing bedroom and snuggled his feet beneath his snoring hound, the code activation notice had appeared in his inbox.

  This was it. This was the day he became king of the world. Maybe Dad wouldn’t care, and Mom wouldn’t even know about it, and his so-called friends at school would keep picking on him and cutting him out of their conversations during lunch period—but in Feyland, he would reign above all. He wouldn’t need any of them then.

  He geared up in his gloves and helmet, then wrapped a scarf around his face to protect his nose and cheeks from the icy air.

  His system was rickety, but he knew guys online who gamed ten hours a day on flicker rigs his dad would have been ashamed of. He couldn’t complain.

  “Here goes nothing!”

  His stomach lurched and he fell into the game.

  * * *

  The sun stood on the horizon, seemingly very far off. A sea-like prairie stretched away before Fasster, tall grass flickering from emerald to sage as the breeze ruffled the stalks. As inviting as it looked, he'd stay away from the Horselands for this outing. This time he was headed back to a side quest he'd never been able to beat. It was the perfect test for his mod.

  Today he would slay Hig-Tuli, the Rage Bear of Deller's Cave.

  He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled for his mount. As usual, he heard the bark before he appeared. He'd used a third party plugin called X-Jen's Familiar-Maker to re-skin Feyland’s standard horse. It now looked just like Nodo, except he was the size of a horse.

  With a bound, Fasster hopped on Nodo's back and hugged his neck and gave him the command to run: “Fly, you fool!”

  Wind blew back Fasster’s hair, which he kept super long in game. Dad made him cut it short in real life. The mid-summer heat wasn't too bad beneath the hazy sky, a nice change from last time. For some reason, his leather armor always made him sweat and chafe.

  With a quiet command, he told Nodo to take him to Nym, the creature who would give him the quest.

  He found the fuzzy little critter in its usual spot, lounging beneath a willow and grooming itself. More feline than humanoid, the creature’s furry ears twitched into alertness as Nodo tromped toward him. Or her. Fasster didn’t know which Nym was. And perhaps Nym didn’t know either.

  Without turning to face him, Nym sighed and straightened its waistcoat. “Well met, Fasster. I must confess I’m surprised at your willingness to die and die and die and die and die and die and die—”

  “This time will be different,” Fasster said. He didn’t bother dismounting. He and Nym had gone through this routine a dozen times.

  With a sigh, Nym recited its spiel. “Hig-Tuli guards a treasure rare, a relic sacred and powerful: the Talisman of the Heart. Slay the Beast and bring me the Talisman. Complete this quest and I shall grant you a boon.”

  Keep your boon, Fasster thought. With his mod, nothing in this world would be denied him. Still, he knew better than to speak his thoughts to the mercurial creature until he’d tested things out.

  “I shall bring you the Talisman or die trying.”

  “’Tis not a quest to go on alone,” Nym warned for the umpteenth time. “To defeat Hig-Tuli, one needs a powerful ally.”

  Fasster ignored this warning as he had done many times before. “There are three of us. Me, myself, and I.”

  Nym laughed and finally turned to face Fasster. The cat eyes squinted with mirth, mouth parting to flash needle-pointed teeth. “I sai
d a powerful ally, not a stupid one.”

  Biting back a curse, Fasster turned Nodo away from the creek and left the giggling Nym behind. He knew better than to respond. Nym always had to have the last word.

  Fasster told Nodo to take him to Deller’s Cave so he wouldn’t have to steer yet again through the same winding path. And so leaving his mount on autopilot, he turned his attention to bringing his mod into existence.

  “Powerful ally,” he mumbled. “I’ll show you a powerful ally, little kitten.”

  Despite the outward bravado, he found himself hesitating. The downside of failure would be pretty bad. If he got caught, some sysadmin would kick him out of the game. Probably ban him forever.

  But if he didn’t get caught, he would own the game and destroy all opposition.

  And that was totally worth the risk. Maybe here, at least, he could be powerful.

  He closed his eyes and relaxed. Nodo's easy bounds over the terrain soothed him, gave him confidence. Already they had entered Whileaway Forest, bringing the scent of pine and earth to his nose. Somewhere ahead was the mountain and Dellar’s Cave.

  With a deep breath, Fasster pictured his mod and spoke the words. “I summon thee, Sword of Absolute, Total, and Utter Invincibility!”

  Thrusting out his right hand, he willed the weapon into existence.

  There wasn't so much as a flicker of light. No sudden swell of orchestral music. Not even a magical chime.

  Instead, the object just appeared in his hand. Like any good magical weapon, the sword was light and perfectly balanced. And it would hold a razor’s edge without sharpening no matter how much armor or bone he chopped through.