A store in the wake of devastation.

Henry was The Tyrant.

Silver peered at him now and observed, finally, what lay beneath the flimsy outer layer of skin. The last traces of relief at seeing him dropped from her expression, the warmth. As if blasted by a frosty wind, she spasmed with an involuntary shudder, and her body contracted slightly, the neck withdrawing into her shoulders, her torso curling forward, allowing less of herself to occupy this inhospitable space.

She grimaced.

Henry, all too familiar with the disgust and horror devouring her features, confirmed that their romantic incompatibility would not be defeated.

Like himself unable to ignore Rose being an assassin, Silver would not ignore his role in a videogame.

He hadn’t been the sole player with delusional attachments.

The main quality he’d been attracted to in Silver wasn’t her looks nor her intelligence but a spiritual beauty, her empathy. Where most their age were in the phase of teenage narcissism, she was someone who cared deeply about others, who suffered their pains and celebrated their joys, who appreciated the magnificence and importance of the universe outside her small self.

This trait carried over to her writing, which had a distinctive immersiveness. The Saana in her stories, unlike in Henry’s own heavily repressed accounts, was one of vibrant settings and varied personalities whose struggles, however minor, were presented with the nobility and weight that every individual’s ambitions held for themselves. The artifices—the numbered displays, the mechanisms of balance, the precise management of video-game resources—vanished, and the reader was given the impression of opening the private diary of a teenager transported to a magical realm of adventure. For this reason, her stories were consumed by players and non-players alike.

And what this immersiveness of her novels—written in the format of a candid, uncalculated first-person voice—ultimately reflected was the immersiveness of the author, absorbed and responding to Saana with a human sincerity, making no distinction between the characters and herself.

For Henry, who lived a bleak existence crusading alone in a world of indifference, of nihilism, and worse, Silver’s companionship had been a comfort. Like an oasis in a desert, the hours with her had provided a needed break. Around someone of a similar mind, he didn’t have to suppress his hatred, he could relax his guard, he could forget the wars for a while.

At a less complicated level, as for any soul beset with many troubles, it was nice to be with someone empathetic.

But, because she cared so much, their relationship had no future.

In the book he’d given her, he’d expressed the incompatibility with the failed side of a love triangle linking an ordinary modern girl and an NPC afflicted with combat fatigue she could never relate to. The more honest framing, however, had been in the second story he’d written for himself alone on that day on the plains, the more absurd quadrilateral. The obstacle between them was not the shellshock that made certain qualities of Henry unrelatable to almost anyone in his generation, Silver being one of the rare players capable of fathoming the psychic annihilation that might result from participating in hundreds of ‘videogame’ battles. What blocked them was a vague fourth figure in the background, the half of himself that he’d concealed.

Who had Henry been outside of this atypical week duelling in Suchi?

For the average player, he was The Tyrant of Saana, an enigmatic general who’d commanded his armies in a grandiose series of victories against a vast cast of rivals, who’d conquered this virtual planet not once but twice. In the past six months, he’d enjoyed the spoils of his wars by selling out; he’d implemented a series of controversial reforms through his subsidiary guild Flaming Sun to commercialise Saana, redirecting players off the battlefields and into his private stadiums, his PVE dungeons, his sight-seeing tours. Tonight, the public discovering they’d been bamboozled by his charade of masks, they were learning of his quirky side-hobby of duelling.

But what about the rare soul who sensed humanity in the native inhabitants of Saana? For them, The Tyrant might be a mass murderer. His military campaigns were littered with the bodies of millions of casualties. In the ‘commercial reforms’, behind Flaming Sun, was The Company, who operated like a hybrid between the mercantile companies of the 16th to 18th century and a medieval empire, who relied upon the ruthless tactics once employed by such historical entities.

Just yesterday, although it’d been clothed in the guise of a religious ritual, although it accorded with the customs and proscriptions of this land, the fact was that Henry'd tortured a man to death. He’d slit the Senior Director’s veins and artificially prolonged his consciousness to force him to writhe in the agony of every blood-deprived cell gasping for oxygen.

Executions as gruesome and more than this were regularly administered by his guild. This was not done out of a sadistic pleasure but a pragmatic decision Henry’d made in adaptation to the horrendous conditions of this world. Many of the institutions, technologies, and societal developments that’d eventually rendered execution redundant were absent. No paper trails existed, no cameras, no prisons and schools, no national identities creating a shared sense of wellbeing, no social safety nets preventing one from falling into criminal desperation. Most incidents of killing went unsolved and unpunished. After committing murder, one could simply migrate to a village a hundred kilometres away and the crime would cease to chase them. Consequently, in the rarer instances when someone was apprehended, it behoved their captor to utilise them better, to amplify their death into a more vibrant example, to display their anguished screams and mutilated body to the public in order to impress upon any would-be offenders spectating that, while the risks may have been lower, the price of failure was viscerally high.

And torturous executions were but one example of The Tyrant’s measures. The Senior Director had volunteered information on The Empire in exchange for the safety of his wife and children because, in the usual circumstances of treason, the punishment was applied to the perpetrator’s family. To dissuade costly sieges, The Tyrant made examples of cities that barred their gates by lining up the citizenry afterwards and killing them one by one. To expand the reach of his finite power, The Tyrant compromised by allying with sadistic ghouls like Rose’s brothers and Ramiro.

Henry’d accepted history’s grim truth, that peace only came after war, that the luxuries of the modern era were as much ushered in by intellectual and technological progress as by a progression of targeted murders, that—in the earlier stages of civilisation ruled by dynasties willing to sacrifice their entire population before conceding a title—the murder of a couple dozen could avert thousands, the murder of a couple thousand could avert millions, the murder of a couple million could avert billions, and he’d done that. He’d contemplated hard and long the calculus of human advancement, and he’d accepted the task of writing down the equations, using his own hand and the stolen ink of many others to inscribe both the pluses and the minuses.

To some, the minuses alone were his most essential quality, what it meant to be ‘The Tyrant’. If one considered each of those millions to be people, then he ranked alongside mankind’s most prolific despots.

So, returning to the matter of teenage love, how many young women would fantasise of sleeping in the loving embrace of Stalin? Of locking lips with Adolph Hitler?

His bodycount was higher than either of theirs.

He'd piled up a whole mountain.

Silver, without a single trace of sadness, cast an appalled stare at the book in her fingers.

At once, the grand act of sincerity it’d represented to her—the flattering dedication to her voice through mimicry, the concentrated intellectual labour portraying her as a fixation of love—the overwhelming emotion of it all curdled into something...vile.

“It’s not an elaborate attempt to garner sympathy,” Henry answered. “It’s not designed to validate my perspective, nor to persuade you that yours is somehow faulty. I wrote that after admitting defeat. The feelings of mine are in there, but they only amount to one plot of eight, an absurdist tragicomedy wedged between an on-the-nose satire and a sincere pastiche, all of them subordinate to the cliche ur-myth about mankind’s foolish quest to conquer death and how, despite the impossibility of reaching that goal, we obtain our highest state of human beauty by trying anyway. That minute dot buried in the avalanche, that’s the limit of me. In the end, he’s not the one who gets the girl, is he? He’s a side-character.”

By ‘he’, Henry was referring to the character modelled partially off himself, the third corner of the love triangle that gets chipped off and forgotten, his function being nothing but to dramatise the coupling of the main pair.

Silver listened passively to his commentary, unable to summon a reaction specific to it. The feelings and thoughts she might’ve had on this matter were being destroyed by the rapid expansion of a black mass in her stomach. As this growing thing came into contact with each memory between them, it disintegrated the containers in which those memories had been stored and absorbed their contents into itself, feeding itself until it’d grown too large to be heaved out of her throat.

Dumping the book on the table in disgust, she stood up, the abrupt motion knocking her chair over. “Don’t contact me again.”

Without a glance at the fallen piece of furniture, without another glance at The Tyrant, she walked out of the front door.

Thus, she left, their romance finished.

Sic semper tyrannis.

Henry made no effort to pursue further. He wouldn’t be arguing his case, nor would he be begging for forgiveness. Anyone who’d grasped their delusion would realise how disgusting and pointless those efforts would have been.

His minor act of admission would have to suffice then. This’d been the limit to which he could escort this love to the exit.

Despite the rejection, he wouldn’t regret telling her in person, even if it’d failed. This was more closure than he’d had before.

He chuckled at a familiar blue message that’d popped up in his vision.

You have been blocked by Silver Wolf.

This time, she wouldn’t be removing it.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Silver’s footsteps were audible for a while, clapping off the pavement between the chants of the priests outside. There was no irregularity, no hesitancy, no subtle pause to indicate a fleeting desire to turn back.

The troops around Henry were giving expectant stares, awaiting an order to sprint out and bag her.

“Leave her.” He waved in dismissal. “Even The Tyrant’s allowed to have a teenage crush that fails pathetically.”

The soldiers—from Chayoka, like most of The Company’s NPC military branch—didn’t comprehend. Their culture had no concept of romantic autonomy; before his conquests, their women had been monopolised by clan chiefs, who distributed wives to reward meritorious contributions to the clan.

“It’s a bizarre Offworlder custom,” Henry joked. “Our Big Chiefs granted women freedom. Many agree the decision was a mistake, but what can you do?”

His audience didn’t laugh, unable to produce any humour in his presence.

Once Silver's steps had faded, Henry grabbed the book she'd discarded on the table, the little tale containing his repressed sentiments. He opened it and flicked through the pages. A running commentary had been penned in the margins, pointing out the ludicrosity of plot points, commanding him to excise segments, to apologise. After parodying her for the series, he could hear her voice admonishing him, down to the tone of exaggerated annoyance covering her quieter like for it.

Storing the novel in his inventory, he strolled back to the shattered window, popping his head outside, a Bishop in the church procession giving him a prolonged glimpse.

Silver had already disappeared from sight, swallowed by the curvature of the street. In The Slums, she would have left a trail of footsteps in the dusty road. Here, on the hardened clay lit up by the rising sun climbing the city walls to usher in another warm, moistureless day, she left no visible trace.

It would be a lie to say the rejection didn’t hurt Henry at all. A part of himself, the teenager he’d preserved in the off-duty hours at his bookstore, was grieving the loss. However, this one pain always had to be positioned next to the rest inside him.

Twenty minutes ago, after sewing her head back to her neck one stitch at a time, he'd delivered the mutilated corpse of a little girl to her grandfather. While he’d made his duelling comeback, thousands more had died in their own horrendous way across his Trading Posts. Elsewhere, around the global empire the public now recognised him as controlling, many others were dying...always.

This had been the case during his entire holiday in Suchi. In the span of every breath he took, between each inhalation and exhalation, several more expired.

Weighed against such travesties, a failed teenage romance couldn’t amount to much. Whatever he’d been carrying in his heart on this account would soon evaporate, the last vestiges purged by a single date and the briefest of conversations. He had an acute awareness that the moment he removed his focus from this one small sorrow, he would not be able to relocate it on the mountain of others, his love lost like the anonymous corpses that littered the snows of Everest.

When Henry reflected upon his flattened reaction to his first love failing, upon the ease with which he’d already accepted the result and moved on, he saw yet again, logically, the necessity to separate from this gameworld warping his priorities, numbing him to an event that might've grieved most teenagers, causing him to look upon an abuse victim like Geno’s sister with raw contempt.

This deadening of his personal attachments was by no means limited to these girls. He’d been neglecting his family and friends, these years having transformed him into a hermit who ate and slept at his workplace. From the angle of humanitarianism, time was finite and each hour he devoted to solving the miseries of this game world marked an hour not spent on the similar problems of the real world.

And, he had to ask himself, for what exactly was he martyring his personal life? In time, his labours in this game would be erased by The Cycle, this latest empire destined for the same fate as his previous one buried in the desert behind The Maelstrom. Eventually, the entire universe of Saana for which he’d endured so many ordeals would vanish as every game universe must, and all he would retain would be this inability to connect with anything real anymore, a sad loner clinging to his digital nostalgia.

He had to move on.

Even Saana these days was pushing him in that direction, with this harassment from a trickster deity preying on his over-attachment.

He had to move on.

But the essential question hadn’t been whether to move on, but how to move on, how to defeat the impediments that prevented his retirement.

The obvious answer would be to log off and do something else.

Henry had actually attempted going cold turkey – that's what he’d been doing before this week. Alas, as could be surmised from his current location, he’d failed. All it’d taken had been Alex setting up a bet with no genuine stakes for him to leap right back in. The ultimate truth was that he’d been persuaded by such a flimsy offer because, in his heart, he’d not wanted to quit. Henry was as ludicrous as the Pliant Vine tribesmen composing poems of hatred for their Forest Farms. He could complain incessantly about Saana's atrocious design and fantasise about hyperbolic speeches espousing Wu-Wei and the merits of inaction, but the unspoken negation that carried through to his contradictory actions was that he'd loved the game and its inhabitants. The suffering he’d endured had been offset with plenty of highs, and his career as The Tyrant had been—and would be forever—the most monumental and fulfilling undertaking of his fleshbag existence. Rose’s brother had been correct in this regard; playing general, going to war while shouldering an empire’s worth of citizens, this had been a transcendent struggle. Fame, money, romance, family - nothing equalled carrying an entire planet on your back. To imagine Atlas ever shrugging of his burden was absurd; the titan loved his punishment, and his secret terror wasn’t that the world might be destroyed by his letting go but that it might—even more horribly—continue to float. It’d been with immense difficulty that Henry’d forfeited command.

An experience of this significance resisted fading. Henry’s hippy buddy Peaceloveharmony, years after quitting to tend his organic beat farm, remained under the constant threat of relapse. And Henry’d striven much further than PLH, entrenching Saana deeper into his soul.

The Overdream had granted him a grim insight into the depths of his affliction. After over a century relaxing on an organic farm of his own, his digital half had still been an insomniac, still as haunted by the corpse mountain as ever. An entire human lifespan was too short a timespan for the stains from killing tens of millions to wash off the hands naturally, and it’d only been in the final decades with his Forest Farm, when he’d attacked his attachments with that laborious exercise in relinquishment, that he’d made any significant progress divorcing his soul from Saana.

His physical self, who didn’t have centuries to live, would never have achieved peace without a similar pro-active measure to free himself from this world’s bond. He had to go beyond merely ignoring the problem. He had to resist it; he had to fight it.

Then, many offensive procedures were available for moving on, some already lingering ignored around Henry.

Cathy, in manipulating him to join his schoolfriends in Suchi, had been trying to re-invest him in minor social dramas and thereby contract his soul back to concerns about flesh-and-blood people.

Alex had seen hope in the arena, in reverting to the innocent mindset of the past and reconditioning his dagger thrusts to be less sinister.

Henry’s grandmother, with the university enrolment, had wanted him to resume the normal struggle of one his age, refocusing his worries on due dates for assignments.

Henry himself, in the brief period between his retirement and his return to Suchi, had started the first leg of his world travels. His plan had been to replace the citizens of Saana occupying his head with those of reality, to replace the memorised landscapes across which his armies had marched with the geography of earth.

There was also the therapeutic treatment Geno’s sister had undergone, a regime of cognitive restructuring and, perhaps, pharmaceuticals. He already kept shrinks on his payroll for guild members that went too deep, and he'd probably book an appointment the moment he logged off tonight. Of course, going so far as Rose or Ramiro to murder NPCs for a sick proof of their unreality, that was beyond his capacity.

Experiments by his digital half in the Overdream had yielded a myriad of zanier possibilities.

And, one day, although today did not seem to be that day, he might receive the hero’s final death by love.

Henry, syncretic by nature, would draw from all these methods plus more. Due to the magnitude of his dilemma, this endeavour would likely never be completed by the conclusion of his physical life, each day being a renewed effort to steal back another shard of himself claimed by this perverse universe, to descend from the high altitudes and learn to re-identify and appreciate the contours of the relatively flat-looking terrain.

Was that a tragedy? Henry couldn't be sure. In his heart, he considered his plight so minor relative to his crimes that even counting them as karma was a grave insult against the victims of his regime. The only end owed to any tyrant was a dagger in the belly and a dirty floor to weep against while their spasming body went cold. But, instead of a righteous death, Saana, objectively, had rewarded him with unfathomable wealth and digital immortality. All he’d suffered was the pain of one rejection and a tiny bit of guilt, the first feeling faded already - but the guilt, also, was nothing but a feeling confined to his own head, a feeling whose real worth could be observed now, as he exercised the disgusting privilege of the living to abandon it.

Maybe one day, if he progressed far enough, his evaluation would change.

Regardless, in the near future, one big opportunity was about to arrive to shed the first major chunk of these pathological attachments.

With his identity leaked prematurely, Suchi would be undergoing some changes in the coming week. If The Tyrant stuck around, the dinky starting zone would soon be flooded with a whole cast of veterans on pilgrimage to seek him out, enemies, past friends, nutty fans – mostly the first category. What’s more, Alex just had the brilliant idea of relocating their massive Winter arena event here, redirecting a couple extra million competitors and visitors to this shore and blowing the recruitment tournament up to absurd proportions; Henry, once having to pummel the noobs of Suchi, would now be faced with the noobs of the entire world.

He could whinge about these hassles, he could rage, he could disappear back into his habitual shadows, but, if the ultimate goal were to move on, a more proactive alternative might be better.

Instead, as he’d attempted without much success tonight, he might make another little effort to confront his problems, to tame a portion of the chaos into serving him. Enjoying the tournament was beyond his capacity, Henry being many years away from deriving genuine pleasure in anything; nevertheless, it could still be therapeutic, in the way that, say, a funeral was not enjoyable but therapeutic. He could convert the tournament into something like that, a funeral, a whacky farewell for the part of himself obsessed with this game. To this public ceremony in his memory, he could invite everyone, his old comrades to pay their respects, his old enemies to air their grievances, and together they could all commiserate the passing of The Tyrant by shedding a couple litres of body fluids. In the finale, as his coffin was being lowered into the grave, he’d joined them in grabbing a flower of farewell and tossing it onto his dead career.

An overdramatic metaphor - macabre, tacky. Such an event would do nothing to atone for those he’d massacred, but, then again, had that ever been the purpose of a funeral? More than saying farewell to the dead—who, usually, couldn’t hear anymore—wasn't what we, who survived, really sending off on these occasions our own heart's lingering attachment to the dead? The purely symbolic rituals enabled the lagging heart to catch up with the reality the brain already perceived, the therapeutic value hidden in the same non-specific elements of the mourning rituals that made placebo drugs semi-efficacious: the magnitude, the directionality, the sensuosity, the response-to-stimulus, the intent, the will. By performing a set of arbitrary actions towards the dead's death, one drove into the heart a confirmation that they were indeed dead, that any further obligations to them had ceased, that the portion of the self once shared with them could be reclaimed and recycled for the other uses left in the remainder of one’s own brief, precarious existence. That’s how we moved on with life, funeral by funeral.

The event ahead would be like the cathartic funeral games that the ancient Greeks'd held for their fallen heroes, except the deceased himself would be in attendance, his corpse competing alongside everyone else.

Or, Henry supposed, a less gloomy and more accurate analogy would be a retirement party.

A duelling tournament certainly wouldn’t be as dismal as a funeral, nor tonight’s romantic travesty. He should win it, this being a domain he was marginally better at than personal relationships.

But the finale was hard to call yet – he wasn’t the only freak in the world, many more having popped up since his duelling hiatus.

While ruminating on these absurdities, Henry’d been casually observing the church procession consecrating their blood-filled jars, his impression of that adding to the funereal mood of his thoughts.

The Bishop who’d gawked at him earlier broke from the others and approached the store window to converse with him.

Henry sighed.

It really was never going to be finished until he pulled the plug himself…