A sun shone in Ludopolis.

From the bow of the nearly complete Stella Marina, I could take in much of the city and a great swath of the southwestern expanse of the Screenwilds. The great, dry river whose name I yet did not know coiled among hills and bluffs that buffaloed one another in the shadow of a drastic mountain range, its tallest promontories black like arrowheads. I yearned to know what animals they were, the dark motes grazing on those hills in herds.

Beyond that too-close horizon spun greater mountains, the great Shards which I think of as stones. But if they were anything like Platformia, I knew they were much more than that. The sun was on track to set behind the a broad Shard, huge and bulky with wide, flat expanses. Beside and beneath it, a dangerous and dark little sibling, shaped like a lightning bolt and indeed flashing from time to time in its various districts and biomes, twisted more swiftly yet just as silently. I noticed a concentration of the smaller chunks in the sky here, microplanets filling the upper atmosphere and beyond like a thick dust or a swarm of gnats over a mud puddle.

Helmgarth, having reverted somehow to his default form (he had said he felt that the “Boyfriend Helmgarth mod” had experienced “a fatal error” due to an “incompatibility”), was becoming a much better dog petter. His reversion came after a lengthy visit to the Ludic Grotto where he meditated, gave thanks and brought offerings, although he would not say what they were. He did not have the pointed fingers that her majesty the Princess had, he knew me a bit better and could find that spot that causes my leg to begin kicking of its own accord. It is sometimes on the ribs, sometimes on the lower back, and Helmgarth was so entertained the first time it happened that he was willing to chase the mercurial region around my torso. I was wealthy with rubs then. An embarrassment of scritches, so to speak.

“How did I get roped into this?” came Commander Zideo’s voice. We turned to see his back, and the side of his face in profile as he tried to see what obstacles remained in his path.

“Easy,” came the deep voice of Skypatch, the sailor with a scarf between dull epaulets, at once authoritative and avuncular. Both of them lugged one end of a wide, hardwood table with brass fittings up over the top of the gangway and onto the main deck. Zideo’s shoulders were up to his ears, and he walked backward with short, uncertain steps, rigid like a navigator’s dividers. Skypatch looked impatient. “You weren’t out celebrating in the streets like everyone else.”

“Because I was here, bro!” complained Zideo. “I feel like I should be able to go to the thing that’s celebrating me.” He glanced at enviously Helmgarth and myself. “Err, us. Returning the whole-ass sun. You comfortable there, Cormac? Holding that railing up?”

Helmgarth laughed. “The dog can hardly be expected to labor, m’lord.”

“What about you?” shot back Zideo. “I thought you were sworn to carry my burdens.”

“Keep moving,” said Skypatch.

“Aye-aye, fam,” said Zideo, tripping over a single plank of lumber left behind and dropping a leg of the table plunging heavily onto his foot. Helmgarth winced and Skypatch sighed, but moved quickly to lift it, allowing Zideo to roll out and release a jetstream invective.

“You’d make a good sailor,” said Skypatch with a little irony. “Fit right in.”

Helmgarth produced a glass vial with red liquid. “Here,” he said. “I have learned to keep a store of these on hand specifically for you.” Zideo was intaking breath with a hiss through his teeth, massaging his foot through the Jordan-shoe. He bit his lip and accepted the vial, but looked at it uncertainly. “I prithee. Take it.”

Zideo pocketed the vial. “I’m a’ight.” He stood up, slid the wooden plank aside with his good foot, and gripped the corners of the table.

Skypatch crossed his arms and made no move to pick it back up. “You sure you’re good?”

“I’m fine,” said Zideo.

“That’s not what I asked.”

I propped my front paws up on the navigation table. Although the grain looked like walnut and it shone with a finish, the surface nevertheless was pocked and striated by sextants and the heavy hand of a pen. Straight grooves ran both parallel and crosswise of one another. Even more deeply imprinted was a concentration of glyphs or runes I could not read, the impressions of prolific and practiced correspondence. Various signoffs concentrated in the lower right, with a consistent closing that read “_____ yours, Skypatch.” I of course could not read it then, but have since returned to the captain’s quarters of the Stella Marina and had it explained to me by more astute and literate beings.

Zideo shooed me off of the table, but his admonishment was washed out by the cheers of a gathering crowd streets away. The ship itself rested on “drydock” as it were, an airstrip that had been quickly overrun by a city of refugee tents once imports from other realms ceased to appear in the skies over Ludopolis. Zideo and Skypatch bickered and I crossed to the other side of the ship, drawn by the noise.

I could only see glimpses of the excitement—effigies of a purple-hooded young man being struck and stomped on. Drink flowed in the streets.

The banners on the tower danced lazily in a light breeze. I noticed a dash of starlight and green. The Princess stood on the parapets of the tower, watching her subjects and deep in conversation with Addrion, who was gesticulating broadly.

“Που ανήκει αυτό?” asked Nereus, carrying two broad cutlasses, one shorter than the other, both sheathed. Their crossguards were scuffed but well polished.

“Captain’s quarters,” called Skypatch. “Above this desk. Careful with those. Might need them again one day.”

The three disappeared into the captain’s cabin, where I could hear the bumps of furniture and the tones of reproach. Zideo appeared soon after, favoring his right leg. I watched him watching the city, bathed in the broad light of afternoon.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I’m starving.”

I was hungry too, but was even more drawn to the activity in the city.

“I have rations, if m’lord wishes.”

Zideo shook his head. “Not like… food hungry.” But that was all he would say about it. “Hey, speaking of which.” He pinned Helmgarth with a sharp glance. “You missing anything in that backpack?”

The seneschal patted his pockets, then a couple of bulging compartments of the backpack, and did some mental calculations. He froze, and his eyes scanned for something in his mind, as though sifting through a mental version of the backpack. “Possibly.” To me, this meant, “Yes, but something you would not have.”

Something un-crunched into Zideo’s hand. It was dark plastic, a square with a single black stem, and one orange button. It smelled musty from use and travel, and reminded me of one of the devices that my human uses to control his games on the glowing rectangle when he Does A Stream, only far more rudimentary.

Helmgarth’s eyebrows staged a tactical retreat from his eyes, which themselves bulged as if reaching for the object. A pause followed, one much longer than humans are used to permitting without words, and unspoken questions hung in the air. The two men were carefully choosing their next words, and then they started speaking at the same time. Helmgarth deferred to him with a smile just as plastic as the device’s outer shell.

“This is real,” said Zideo. “Like really… real.” He pointed to the sky. “It’s a joystick. And it is deffo not mine. It came out of your backpack in the avalanche. I found it in the snow. Right after I…”

“I can explain,” said Helmgarth. I was glad he interrupted, as I did not like to think about those cold and desperate moments in the Blue Frost.

“Okay.” Zideo waited. “Go ahead.”

“But really, it would be better for her majesty to tell you.”

Zideo glared, and seemed to become much taller than the seneschal. Helmgarth reached for it, but Zideo pulled his hand back and closed it over thin air. The object, the “joystick” (a word more suited, in this dog’s opinion, to something more readily chewed on), vanished with a crunch.

“Maybe,” said Zideo. “Listen. I don’t care about your culty little religion or whatever. What’s on the other side… I hate to tell you this, but…”

I heard Helmgarth gasp. I turned my head toward the western frontier, where the creatures grazed on the hills, and caught the last moment of the flash of light. A thread-thin streak of light bent into the sky, into the stars.

The light was familiar to me, and I recalled the strange bird trilling, etc., at us from the branches when Commander Zideo had fallen down the embankment during our flight from the Empire of Sorrow in the jungles of the southern Screenwilds.

“Μια θεοφάνεια,” came Nereus’ voice behind us.

Now I was more interested in the phenomenon than a head-scratch, or even food. Okay, that is a lie, but I still wanted to know. As if reading my mind, or perhaps just talking to himself, he said, “Whatever it was, it had become gameworthy.” He gazed for some time in hopes of catching another, like a shooting star. “Maybe we’ll see it one day. I’m… surprised the Screenwilds can still generate things like that.”

“Let’s go to the tower,” said Zideo.

“M’lord,” said Helmgarth, physically wringing his hands. “One does not simply drop in on her majesty. One answer’s the call.”

“Well hopefully she’ll make an exception for us. I mean, I figured we’d end up with some kind of awards ceremony at this point, like Han and Luke, you know what I mean?” We took our leave of Skypatch, who said nothing and found some blemish on his pipe to polish away. “It was cool to meet you, Nereus. See you later.”

The philosopher shrugged, his toga tousled by the breeze. “Μπορεί.”

The tent city along the airstrip was mostly empty but for one or two stragglers. An enormous white-bellied creature like a fat panda snored loudly by the base of the airstrip tower, even in broad daylight.

In the streets, the Irregulars were hard-pressed to maintain order. Luciano waded through a crowd of beings carrying Acornite Dylan over their heads. The assault plant looked a little malnourished to my eye, and squinted in the sun like a happy cat. (An analogy you know I would not make lightly.) Others joined in, hurling confetti leftover from the Fate’s Eve celebration. The starlight-sashed woman with ankle-length pigtails danced with a humanoid frog wearing sunglasses.

There was a disturbance in the street, and people began to run. What began with screams changed into something more uncertain, that feeling of precarious balance when a crowd is deciding whether to flee. We were jostled backwards as beings of a dozen different heights and articulations backed away from something in the avenue between temporary housing next to the airfield and the columned facade of the city bank.

Glyphs levitated in the air, great and glowing. The words they formed were greater than a Honda Micro-Commuter EV. The white hue of the lights blurred at the edges, its contours hinting at a composition of red, blue and green. I was careful to memorize the ligatures and stems of this strange thing.

GORO

it read, rising noiselessly in the air. Although it grew from the ground like a ghost, it yet dripped with someone’s spilled drink. Another word followed it.

MATSUOKA

I would not have known then how to sound this out. I now know that these were human words, but not human English ones necessarily, although the script was the same.

The feel of the crowd was a kind of tentative relief. They watched what I now know is a name rise into the air. It was followed by another, appearing a few yards down the avenue and overturning a cart of fruit.

SHIRO

NAKAI

read that one. Then, lifting above the rubble where the rebuilding project had stalled during the absence of the sun, another name:

KAITO

ISHIKAWA

To a crowd who has already been through too much, and was only too glad to have something not stage some kind of attack on their city, it became a game. People laughed and screamed when they saw the omens appear in the streets or over rooftops, cheering and toasting whoever these names referred to.

We took advantage of the distraction of the celebrants to cut through town toward the Lower Courts of the tower, seeing the names appear all over town. Zideo stumbled over AYA INOUE, and my tail slapped a sharp corner of KAZUYA AKABANE, but no major injury was done.

“You know,” said Zideo. “Where I come from, we just get rain. And that’s not even very often. He watched the ground as we entered the Lower Court, Shiori stationed at the base of the stairway with stoic eyes and the ghost of a smirk. “Do you guys get words raining out of the ground often?”

Helmgarth’s face looked angelic. “No, m’lord. This is a once-in-a-life-time omen.” His eyes were on Zideo, and he beamed. “If my father could only see this today. End Credits in Ludopolis, of all things.”

The hall was briefly illuminated by other words passing by.

THANKS

FOR

PLAYING