CHAPTER 1

It was a beautiful, crisp fall morning in Vlachia. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I was plummeting out of the sky on the back of a dragon, headed straight for Archemi’s unluckiest Glacier Toad.

“YEEEE-HAWW!” I clutched onto the saddle with my knees and one hand, spear gripped in the other as Karalti dove, arrow-straight, at the monsters below. “HERE COMES LEVEL SEVENTEEN, BITCHHHHES!”

The Glacier Toads were oblivious to the doom descending on them from the sky at two hundred miles an hour. Some of them were squabbling over who got to mate with who, their ice attacks freezing up the water. Others were rutting or shitting in the river and fouling the stream.

Just before we reached terminal velocity, Karalti snapped her wings out, fanned the fins of her tail, and bought us back up into a tight slingshot curve. The nearest Glacier Toads stopped humping and turned around just in time to see the dragon’s jaws gape open.

“CHAAAAARRR!” A plume of oily white flames erupted from Karalti’s throat, a sticky napalm-like stream she wielded like a bull-whip across the frog mob. Suddenly, the air was full of monstrous screams and the smell of cooked amphibian.

[You used a fire attack! It’s super effective! X3 damage!]

But we weren’t done yet. As Karalti pulled out of the dive and the g-forces crushing me against her saddle lifted, she twisted to the side, flinging me off into a controlled tumble. Like a gyroscope, I oriented mid-air and flew at the nearest flaming toad, Spear-first. Dark energy rippled along my arms and the weapon like electricity building charge around a Tesla Coil.

“Anchors away! Fire in the hole!” I slammed the Spear of Boundless Strength down underneath me and drove the glaive-like blade into the ground, releasing the built-up Umbra Blast. The toad I hit exploded into smoking goo. The other eight were struck by twisting, thorny tentacles of shadow that exploded from the ice like the arms of the motherfucking kraken. The Glacier Toads wouldn’t be effected by the Freezing debuff, but the attack itself still hurt them. A lot.

[Umbra Blast deals 1484 damage!]

[Glacier Toad is immune to Freezing!]

[You have killed Glacier Toad!]

“Take that, you slimy sons-of-bitches!” I yelled. “Who has the tentacles now, huh?”

The two attacks nuked the entire mob below 50% HP. Screaming, burning toads launched themselves at me, icicles erupting from their skin. I Shadow Danced out of the way, burning 10 HP to briefly disappear and dodge as they blew shards of ice in every direction. I couldn’t avoid all of them, though. As I reappeared, a couple of stray icicle shuriken impacted me in the arm and shoulder.

[You have taken 85 damage!]

[You have taken 79 damage! HP: 819/1283]

[You are Frozen!]

[You have killed Glacier Toad!]

[You have killed Glacier Toad!]

“Fuck!” Frost crawled up my arm in a crackling wave, numbing my fingers and rooting me to the spot. I snarled in frustration as the surviving toads all turned on me and opened their mouths wide.

Whatever dastardly thing they were about to do was cut short when a cold shadow blocked the hot sun, and Karalti fell on the monsters like an avenging angel. The ground jolted as she landed on one toad, pulping it, then swung her head around to blast the fleeing monsters with fire.

The Frozen debuff timer disappeared, and suddenly I was free. Whooping, I sprung from the ground like a cricket and landed to the side, flanking the toads and pinning them between me and Karalti. They skidded to a halt, crashing into each other.

“You’re not the only ones who can Jump!” I triggered my workhorse combo, dashing forward in a nimbus of scarlet-black energy with Blood Sprint, and releasing the power like a lightning bomb with Blood Storm. The Spear went through the Glacier Toads like a scythe through wheat.

[You have killed Glacier Toads!]

[You have gained 1250 EXP!]

[Quest Update: Clear Springs]

[Congratulations! Karalti is Level 8!]

Some of the toads ruptured, spilling clouds of frost onto the mossy ground. Others simply croaked it. I turned around just in time to see Karalti stand up tall and close her eyes. The thick seams of brilliant opal between her black scales swelled with color and light, which flooded across her body in a rippling wave. Her slender, velociraptor-like frame swelled in size, wings and tail lengthening. Her elegant wedge-shaped head became a little sharper, her seven-horned crest longer. By the time the light passed, the dragon had put on a full ten feet of length.

“Hell yeah! That’s how it’s done!” Panting, I punched the air as the last flaming toad collapsed like a sack of blue guts onto the snow. “Go Team Hector!”

“Team Hector? What do you mean ‘Team Hector’?” The dragon huffed with irritation, stepping out of the steaming pile of mashed Glacier Toad. She made a face, and lifted her back foot to lick it, balancing on her forelimbs. “Who just saved your butt, huh? I’d say it’s Team Karalti.”

“Well who just spear-dived into this writhing amphibian orgy like a total boss?” I teased back. “And who got us this side quest to begin with?”

“Well who is the one that flies all over the place so we can do the side-quests?”

I laughed, and began searching the corpses before they turned to dust and vanished. “Okay, fine. I’m just a plate of chopped liver.”

“You will be if you keep picking on me.” Karalti shook her foot like a cat with a wet paw. She strutted out of the way and sat back on her tail to preen. “Wow, that was a good level. I feel big. Do I look bigger?”

I turned to look at her properly then, and almost swallowed my tongue. Lord have mercy: she looked freaking enormous. After that little growth spurt, her head was as long as a door, her jaws easily large enough to pick up a human and swallow them in a couple of bites. “Yeah, you do. Just means there’s more of you to love.”

She rumbled in her throat, and the preening turned coy. “Awww. You’re so sweet.”

“Sweet as sugar and just as bad for you.” I began looting the bodies like a good little adventurer. The Glacier Toads had no money, but they had ingredients. I liked to brew potions and could make money selling medicine, so parts suited me just fine.

* Glacier Toad Blood x 10

* Monster hide x 4

* Glacier Toad Eye x 6

* Unrefined Green Mana x 2

By the time I was finished stripping toads, there wasn’t a whole lot left over. I abandoned the skinned corpses to dissolve under the blazing white light of Archemi’s sun and brought up my holographic HUD. The first thing I did was drink an herbal potion to restore the HP I’d lost, and then I hopped over to the quest menu to check the update.

QUEST UPDATE: CLEAR SPRINGS

His Majesty, Ignas Corvinus III, has issued a bounty on the monsters fouling up the glacial springs that provide Taltos with fresh water. Now that you have dealt with the problem, return to Vulkan Keep and speak with the Castellan to claim your reward.

Difficulty: Level 15-17

Reward: 500 silver rubles, +20 renown (Western Vlachia), 357 EXP.

Karalti had leveled up from the toad massacre, which was awesome, but I hadn’t. I checked my character sheet to see how much EXP I had to get, and groaned. “Oh my god, seriously?”

“What?” Karalti’s head reared up mid-lick. Her forked tongue stuck out between her teeth.

“I am literally seventeen points away from Level 17.” I rolled my eyes and dismissed the menu. “It’s official. God hates me.”

“Don’t worry about it, silly. We’re going back to the castle. The Castellan’ll give us the quest EXP, and then you’ll level up too!” Karalti bobbed her head and went back to grooming her newly enlarged tail fins.

“I wanted the quest EXP on top of the level.” Annoyed and suddenly anxious, I swiped over to the Main Quest to refresh myself for the hundredth time:

QUEST UPDATE: UNTO DEATH

Myszno, in the south-east of Vlachia, was formerly one of the most beautiful places in the country. Now it is a ruin, blighted by undeath and ruled by a powerful vampire lord.

You accepted a grant to travel to this troubled land and reclaim it from the vampire’s claws – a terrible proposition, given how powerful he has become. But with great risk comes great reward. You could become a true Count in Vlachia, with land, property, and income. Truly a base fit for a king – and a queen.

Difficulty: Level 20+ (extraordinary)

Rewards: EXP, 60 build points, Charter to Resettle the Duchy of Myszno.

Update: The Volod of Vlachia, Ignas Corvinus III, is preparing the briefing and supplies you will need to travel to Myszno. You must wait 4 days for preparations to be completed (Day 4 of 4).

I grimaced. “’This says we have to be Level 20 and the quest is rated ‘Extreme’. We leave for Myzsno tomorrow, so-”

“I know, I know. We’ll go hunt later today.” Karalti sighed. “Don’t worry, okay? We’ve been working as hard as we can.”

“Well, obviously not hard enough.” I dismissed the HUD with a thought, staring out over the glacier toward Taltos. It was beautiful up here, cold and stark. The ground was flat and hard, spring water running through trickles carved out of ancient stone. The river had already unclogged, and was burbling happily on its path toward the valley below.

“Hector...” Karalti snaked her head toward me, eyes narrowed. “HOW many sidequests have we done in four days?”

“Four, once we wrap up this one, but-”

“And HOW many levels have we gained since Ignas became king?”

“Almost four levels for me, two for you.” I ran my hand back over my braided hair. “But-”

“And HOW much experience did we earn?”

“Uhh... a little bit under seven k?”

“What about the stat points we gained from training? And skill points?”

Restless, I bought up my character sheet again. “I could stand to gain some more stamina. Now that I think about it, this would be a great place to train Stamina. It’s cold as balls up here.”

“Do you have to?” The dragon yawned wide, flashing a mottled blue-and-black throat and twin rows of razor-sharp teeth. “I’m really hungry.”

“You’ll live. Watch the Spear for me.” I stuck the end of the weapon into a patch of moss, leaving it upright, and unequipped all of my clothes except for my underwear. Then, before I could rethink my life choices, I ran across the frozen ground to the river and dive-bombed in. The regret was instantaneous. It was like jumping into a pit of needles, and when I surfaced, it was with a girly little scream and a lot of flailing. “Holy fuckballs! Cold! Cooollld!”

Karalti laughed, a chucking, yarping sound she made by tossing her head and inflating her throat.

“GYAAHH! Oh god, my nuts!” I splashed my way to the bank and clambered out into the cold wind, clutching myself and dancing from foot to foot. “Fuckity fucking-UGGH, this game!”

Karalti only laughed harder, rocking back on her tail.

[You earned a new Badge: Skinny Dipper]

[Warning! You are at risk of Hypothermia!]

[You are hungry! HP will no longer regenerate.]

[You are thirsty! No HP regeneration]

[You are fatigued! -5% to skill checks.]

I brushed the notifications away like mosquitoes. To level Stamina, I had to stick out the discomfort. Ten seconds, then twenty... and finally, a little red arrow appeared to one side, pulsing upright over three letters, ‘STA’. As soon as I saw it, I re-equipped my armor. It was like wrapping myself in a warm towel. The debuff disappeared, though I was still chilled to the bone. Teeth chattering, I dropped down and began to do clap pushups, right there on the ice.

Unlike Skills – which could either be trained individually or levelled with Skill EXP -Stats were only leveled by gaining Character Levels or by training them. For the first time since my upload into Archemi, we’d had the option to just grind, and grind, and grind. When I’d first entered the game, there’d been a level cap and an EXP penalty system that had crippled all attempts at leveling. After that, I couldn’t take quests because I was a fugitive, and after that, I’d had to juggle a needy dragon hatchling with a time-sensitive, urban story quest that had sucked up all my energy and resources. But now, EXP gain was back to normal, Karalti was mostly grown, and we – that being me, Karalti, Suri and our friend Rin – had four free days to just play the goddamned game and get stacked.

And we had been. My mornings began with training: strength training, agility training, stamina training, and combat skill training. I hung from railings by my fingertips, ran and vaulted over the crenellations of Vulkan Keep, sat under cold waterfalls and wailed on training dummies until I saw those stats go up. Then, it was quest time. Karalti and I had picked up four side-quests in four days, starting with hunting down some weird monsters stealing children from a village outside Taltos. We’d slain a caravan of bandits, killed a lesser vampire in the Lethos Cellar complex beneath the city, and now we’d just de-frogged Taltos’ water supply. I was low on food, water and sleep, but in the days after we killed the old corrupt king and installed his brother on the throne, we’d gained more EXP than we had in the last six weeks. It felt good. But it still wasn’t enough.

“Hector, come on.” Karalti ducked her head, crooning in her throat. “That’s enough. Let’s go home.”

“Our main quest says it’s for Level 20-plus,” I thought to Karalti in between claps. Sweat poured down my forehead. I was battling the debuffs. “I’m only Level 16, and you just hit Level 8.”

“So? We’re a team. We’re way stronger than normal players.”

“Never assume that, Tidbit. We’re headed to a warzone.”

“We are stronger! And I’m not just Level 8. I’m almost at Level 9 already. Once we get the EXP from the Castle Guy, I’ll level up with our next battle!”

“You will?” Heaving for breath, I shakily wrapped up a set of fifty pushups and stumbled to my feet. The burn in my arms felt very real as I unequipped my armor again, standing back in the cold wind. The little red arrow appeared again. One point gained to strength. But then I sniffled. And then, I coughed.

[You have contracted Common Cold! -5% to your Perception.]

“Fuck!” My throat began to feel raw, and I sneezed. Fear coursed through me, rooting me to the spot. “Shit... shit...”

“Hector?” Karalti stood up in alarm and paced toward me, dark, opalescent wings flicking along her sides in her agitation. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sick!” I sneezed again.

“It’s okay! It’s not the flu. It’s just a cold!”

I knew she was right – I’d heard the fucking notification – but I couldn’t stop the panic. The flu had killed me. I still remembered the fever, the rash, the swollen joints and the weight of fluid in my lungs. I reached out to her, and was relieved when my hand found her hot scales. Rumbling, Karalti mantled a wing around us, sheltering me from the wind.

“Sorry.” I wheezed. Heat radiated against my face, warm and soothing. “Can’t help it. It’ll pass.”

“Yeah. But we need to go back to the castle and rest.”

“Okay... okay just... let me check your sheet first.” Wiping my nose, I reopened my HUD and squinted at the holographic display through running eyes:

KARALTI – QUEEN DRAGON

LEVEL 8 SUB-ADULT QUEEN DRAGON

Strength: 60

Dexterity: 76

Stamina: 55

Will: 32

Wisdom: 18

Intelligence: 22

HP: 1271

MP: 80

Affinity: Darkness/Life (Path of Alacrity)

EXP: 7941 (419 to next level)

Lexica: 18

Spells: 5

SKILLS:

Acrobatics: 12

- Aerial Acrobatics: 15

Dive: 10

Laden Flight: 15

Perception: 20 (+5 with rider)

ABILITIES:

Gift of the Blood: Allows a dragon to utilize magic and other supernatural abilities.

Eviscerate: A power attack with the front claws.

Ghost Fire: 249-344 Fire damage; sticky fire that burns underwater and deals ongoing damage to enemies (86 Fire damage per round for 5 rounds).

Bite: 255-511 damage.

Gore: A dragon’s unarmed attacks do double damage and cause Bleeding.

Tail Attack: Blunt-force strike that flings enemies under 400 lbs.

Split Turn: Burn 5 mana points per second to immediately change momentum while rolling. This allows for 90 degree and 180 degree turns in any direction. 2 bonus Lexica.

SPELLS:

Bioscope: Analyze an enemy and learn their strengths and weaknesses. (4 MP, 10 sec cooldown)

Sense Aether: Detect and assess magical effects, artifacts, and locations. (4 MP, 5 sec cooldown)

Dark Focus II: Triple power of next magical attack. (18 MP, 25 sec cooldown)

Dirge: A curse that slowly damages enemies every turn and has a chance to cause the Deaf and Mute debuffs. (16 MP, 25 sec cooldown)

Haste II: Dramatically increases speed for 1 min per spell level (16 MP, 30 sec cooldown)

“Holy shit,” I said. “You’re right.”

“Uh-huh.” The dragon gently rested her jaw on my shoulder “You’ve been working yourself sick, Hector. C’mon. Let’s go home.”

“There’s no such thing as working too hard.” My stomach growled, and I rolled my shoulders to try and distract myself from the pangs. “You get your next Path Ability at Level 10. Come on: if we kill one more monster, we’ll go up again and be that much closer to our goal.”

“Hector. No. Just stop.” Karalti couldn’t roll her eyes – like a bird, she had to turn her head to look in different directions. To express irritation, she rapidly flickered her inner eyelids. “We’re going back to the castle, and you’re going to go to bed and eat some food while I go out and hunt.”

“But we-” Whatever I was about to say was cut off by a vibration in my ear. The curved holographic screen still hanging in front of me said: [Incoming PM: Suri].

“Hello, light of my life.” I tried not to sniffle after picking up the call. “What’s up?”

“Nothing good.” My girlfriend’s lovely honey-and-smoke voice was tight with stress. “We have a situation. Where are you?”

“We were grinding up on the plateau-” I turned my head to cough as Karalti perked up in alarm. “-’S’cuse me, sorry about that. We’re four miles north of Vulkan Keep.”

“Two full-grown dragons with riders just appeared over Taltos,” Suri said grimly. “They’ve got a hostage, and they’re demanding to speak with you.”

A nasty, icy thrill that had nothing to do with the cold crawled down through my guts. Dragon Knights. There was only one thing they were here for. I looked up at Karalti.

“Hector?” Her horns flattened against her skull, even as she crouched and extended a wing to let me onto her back. “What’s wrong?”

“The Order’s caught up with us.” All thoughts of leveling vanished as I caught the saddle straps and hauled myself up. “We have to get back to Vulkan Keep, now.”

----------------------------------------

CHAPTER 2

Dragons.

We heard their unearthly, bone-rattling shrieks from half a mile away, and as soon as we came within range of Vulkan Keep, we saw them. The pair of dragons – one white, one blue – were the size of jetliners, easily three or four times Karalti’s length. They wheeled in the sky high above Taltos, their wings large enough to blot the sun overhead. As we crept our way along the mountainside, the blue dragon split the air with a brilliant violet-white thunderbolt, which struck Talto’s clock tower and blew the roof off in an incandescent flash. The act was petty, contemptuous; like was spitting on the city.

Karalti stuck to the shadows, where she dipped in and out of sight, then cut over Vulkan Keep’s curtain wall and into the fortress itself. The Keep was in pandemonium. Soldiers ran in formation through the gardens, splitting off to seal gates and doors. In the melee, my supernatural eyesight picked out a tall, strikingly beautiful woman with a flaming mop of red curls, dark coppery skin, and an impractically large sword. She was calmly and effectively directing panicked civilians to shelter.

“Head for Suri!” Bent down low over the saddle, I waved an arm at her before remembering that she couldn’t actually see us yet.

“Okay, but Hector... I think...” Karalti trailed off, unusually hesitant. “I think those dragons are my brothers.”

“Well, yeah.” I leaned with the dragon as she angled her body into a tight corkscrew glide toward the ground. “All the dragons from the Eyrie are your sibs, right? Your mom laid all the eggs.”

“I mean... I think they’re my clutchmates.”

“No way, Tidbit. Those are some grown-ass dragons. Do you know how much EXP it takes for a dragon to reach full maturity?”

“Nope.”

"It’s a six-figure number, something close to like… two hundred thousand experience. To go from hatchling to thirty, they’d have needed to pull in something to the tune of thirteen thousand EXP per day, every day, for a month. We couldn’t even scrape together seven thousand in four days, and we worked our asses off.”

We stopped talking to concentrate on the descent. Suri went into action as soon as she saw us, chasing people off to give us somewhere to land. When the garden was clear, the dragon backwinged and flapped to a stop, throwing up dirt from the planters and nearly crushing one of the Volod’s rose beds.

“Hector!” Suri ran to us, yelling to be heard over the shouts and tolling bells, the rattle of gates and the rumble of wagons. “Ignas says to hide Karalti in the inner keep! He has a plan to deal with the dragons!”

The little Queen’s neck swelled, and she snorted a cloud of burning steam. “No! I’m not hiding from anyone!”

“Me either. And they won’t talk unless they see Karalti. Get on!” I offered the Spear down to Suri, blunt end first. “Brief me on the way!”

Suri reached for it, but Karalti took an absent step to the side, her crown of horns flattened down against her skull.

“Karalti, I know you’re not exactly Suri’s biggest fan, but really? Now?” I almost snarled.

“No... it’s not her.” The dragon extended one wing down to Suri, listening to something I couldn’t hear. “Hector... they want to land.”

“Land? They’re communicating with you?” I offered Suri the assist a second time. She caught the spear and used it to steady her climb to the dragon’s back.

“Yeah. But they sound weird. Like...bad weird.” Karalti shuddered.

“Tell Ignas what they want,” I said to her.

“Okay.” Agitated, Karalti ducked her head, leathery wings flicking against her sides. After a minute or two, she bobbed her head. “Ignas says that fits with his plan. We need to draw them to the Vulkan Parade Ground, and then we have to hold them there, keep them talking.”

“Roger that.” I reached back to pat Suri’s thigh. “Hold on. Suri, put your forehead down on my shoulder for takeoff.”

“Okay, lover boy.” Suri clung around my waist, the front of her body molded to my back in a way that would normally be intensely distracting. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy the sensation, because as we took to the air, I got my first real look at the invading dragons.

The blue and white were full-grown, even larger than the old Knight-Commander’s dragon, Talenth. But Karalti was right – they were weird. Normal Archemian dragons were velociraptor-like bipeds, with long narrow wings and gracile limbs taut with corded muscle. They had bright, holographic hides that rippled with color on the ground, and that were mirrored in the sky – a form of natural camouflage. Neither of these dragons were properly bipedal, and neither of them were holographic. The white’s scales were blotched with grayish spots, like white jasper, the blue’s the sickly color of bread mold. Both dragons were abnormally large, with distended forelimbs, clubbed, twisted horns, and asymmetrical features. The white dipped a wingtip and began to lumber his way toward the Parade Ground, revealing the rider. I drew a sharp, startled breath.

It was Lucien fucking Hart, one of my least-favorite people in Archemi.

Ten levels ago, my would-be murderer had been a slim, roguish man with a punchable face and chin-length sandy hair. Now, the hair was shaved short in a high and tight, and the rest of him looked like he’d been stuffing that face with steroids and hitting the gym. He was buffer than me, arms and chest bulging in top-of-the-line armor. Medium armor, the kind a ranger or some other dex-tank might wear. He carried two curved swords over his back and a crossbow at his hip, and he looked about as smug as I’d ever seen him. That was saying something, because Lucien had always been pretty fucking smug.

It took longer for me to identify the woman riding the blue. She was dressed in the stiff, high-collared armor of the Mata Argis. Her long blond hair was bound back in a severe twist at the nape of her neck. She had dark bluish lips, deep bruised eyes, and a crazed, haunted expression that chilled me more deeply than the river water had. It was Violetta, the woman who had gone through the Trial of Marantha with us.

“Oh my fucking god.” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “No way.”

“What?” Suri clutched me in a death grip, white-knuckled as Karalti banked and began her descent toward the parade ground. “What did you say?”

I brought up my HUD to PM her so she could hear me over the roar of the wind, but just as I did, the blue banked, and I spotted Violetta’s passenger. “Oh Jesus.”

It was Rutha. The beautiful Court Sorceress of Ilia was a ghostly shadow of her former self. She wore rags that offered her no protection from the frigid wind, bound and buckled to the saddle like cargo. She was slumped, her head nodding against her chest. Her glorious long white hair had been rudely hacked off, and she was deathly underweight.

“Baldr.” Just like that, my disbelief condensed into something black and empty and cold. A dark, savage part of me stared at the pair of dragons, like a predator waiting behind my eyes. I squeezed the Spear so hard my knuckles cracked. “You motherfucker.”

“Hector?” Karalti’s voice broke through the jangling black noise, sweet and frightened. “They say they’re going to land.”

“Tell them that we’ll land first.” My tone was flinty. “This is our turf. They follow our rules.”

“Are you mad at me?” She asked, in a small voice. “The bad men are here because of me.”

“I’ve never been mad at you for this. Ever.” I gripped down with my knees, urging Suri to lean with me.

Karalti swooped over the wall surrounding the Parade Ground. This morning, the ground had been crowded with airships, cargo, and personnel. Now the huge square plaza was almost empty, hastily cleared of ships and people. We saw a rank of soldiers running across the pavement. They split off into gateways just as a formation of hookwings burst out of the tunnel connecting the parade grounds to Vulkan Keep. His Majesty, Volod Ignas Corvinus III, was in the lead, riding a glossy black dinosaur almost as large as Cutthroat. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, lean man, dressed like a rogue in matte black plate over layers of soft leather. To his right was a formation of Knights of the Red Star, dragoons whose red lamellar armor gave them a samurai-like appearance. To his left rode the intimidating knights of the Order of the Dragon, heavy cavalry who served as his bodyguards. Knowing Ignas, he wouldn’t only put his trust in plate armor. There would be stealth characters already stationed in the Parade Ground, invisible to the naked eye – rogues from the Nightstalkers, and his right-hand Mercurion assassin: The King’s Blade, Ebisa.

Following up at the rear was a single hookwing carrying two people. The man holding the reins looked like a cartoon villain, with a thin face, an oiled, pointed beard and a pair of spell gloves. It was the Court Sorcerer, Simeon. Holding onto him was a pretty, petite Mercurion woman with a cute bob of hair and big blue-on-blue eyes: our friend and favorite Artificer, Rin. Two small walking tanks bounded behind them like a pair of metal wolves.

“Everyone’s here!” I shouted back to Suri. “Hang on and lean with me!”

She nodded quickly. The woman’s arms were so tight I could feel the pressure through my armor. Karalti coasted toward the ground, then gracefully back-winged to land neatly on the pavement. Once we were on the ground, Suri let go with a shuddering sigh.

“You alright?” I asked over my shoulder.

“I’m gonna leave the sky to you from now on.” Suri pressed a shaky kiss to my neck, then let go to slide down Karalti’s offered wing. “Felt like I was gonna fall the whole time.”

“You get used to it, but yeah. It isn’t for everyone.” Once she was down, I stood up on the dragon’s back and waved to Ignas.

The new king of Vlachia jerked his chin in greeting and trotted up. He reined in his wild-eyed, foaming hookwing just in front of Karalti. His posse flowed in around us, forming ranks to either side.

“Lovely way to end the morning, don’t you think?” Ignas called up to us. “Ready, Tuun?”

“As much as we’ll ever be.” I gave him a grim, thin-lipped smile.

The Volod turned his pale eyes skyward. “Lady Karalti, if you would be so kind, please tell our unwanted guests that we shall now receive them.”

Karalti arched her neck and dropped her muzzle down, posturing like a swan as she concentrated. A few minutes passed, and then a windstorm picked up across the plaza as Lucien and Violetta descended. The enormous dragons were clumsy compared to their queen sister, their lumbering descent kicking up dust and rocks into a stinging whirlwind.

Before they touched ground, I sensed that something was very, very wrong. Whether they breathed fire, ice, acid or lightning, all dragons emitted intense heat while flying. These ones… not so much. Instead, the wind of their creaking wings blasted us with cold, and as they came to a halt, I saw frost condense on their scales. Up close, they were even more horrific than I’d thought. Their warped horns curled back in so far their tips had embedded themselves into the bone of their skulls. Their eyes were filmed over with cataracts, and their jaws were misshapen, too many teeth jutting at angles so bad that neither of them could close their mouths properly.

My eyes narrowed. “Karalti. Can you Bioscan these guys?”

“Sure.” Karalti darted her nose forward, light pulsing between her scales. She didn’t have to speak her Words of Power aloud. The Bioscan bought Lucien’s dragon into focus as it crouched, and a holographic panel jumped to life to one side of my HUD: a column of bar graphs and numerical data which my narrator tried to read to me, her voice skipping and warping:

??724Q244FPHTTTTODSL-009SOLONKRATSU [‘VESPER’, WHITE DRAGON]

Sex: M

Level 55

HP: ?????/?????

Weak Against ?????

Immune to ?????

Level 55? Well, fuck me with a spoon. The distorted voice made my skin crawl, but the glitched code string was oddly familiar. I swallowed around a sudden spike of fear as Lucien stepped around the side of his dragon’s neck, leaning out as he grinned down at us. Violetta pulled Rutha out of her harness and held a knife to her neck. The elfin sorceress swooned, unconscious, while Violetta stared daggers at me with dead, dull blue eyes.

“Well, this is quite the reception, isn’t it?” Lucien called, his voice laced with cheerful venom. “Is that the Queen? Good grief, I thought she’d be bigger by now.”

As soon as his attention shifted to Karalti, that cold emptiness rose back up and quenched the fear. Lucien was a mediocre, cowardly piece of shit, and levelling hadn’t changed that. His cheating only proved the fact.

“Well, if it isn’t Lucien fuckin’ Hart.” I grinned back toothily. “Nice Baldr cosplay. Must have taken a lot of hard work.”

Lucien rolled his eyes. “I see you still think you’re funny. We’re here to-“

“And by ‘hard work’, I mean ‘cheating like a motherfucker’. Just to be clear.” I raised my voice and talked right over him. “What the hell happened to you two? And what the fuck happened to your dragons?”

He sneered. “I thought that’d be obvious. We leveled up, gained prestige and positions of power, and now we’re here to advise you as to how things will work going forward. For those who don’t know me, I am Lucien Hart, the Wing Captain of the Order of St. Grigori.”

“Ignas says to keep them talking.” Karalti’s telepathic voice was level, but tight with stress. “They’re almost ready.”

“Wing Captain? You? Jesus Christ.” I forced myself to not stare at Violetta and Rutha, to keep their attention on me. “Let me get this straight: the pair of you just illegally entered a sovereign nation’s airspace, turned up at this heavily fortified castle, and now you want to tell the monarch of said nation what to do?”

“And what are you going to do about it? Vesper and Tempest are fully grown dragons. They could raze this hovel to the ground,” Lucien boasted. “Or are you blind as well as stupid?”

Vesper and Tempest? Those didn’t sound like the kinds of names the Solonkratsu used. The dragons were unnaturally still, wheezing as they breathed. I gestured at them. “I honestly have no idea what I’m seeing here. What the hell did you do to them? They look fucking awful.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Lucien said smugly. “What level is your dragon? Six? Seven?”

I rested a boot against the base of Karalti’s neck. “It’s a number higher than six, but below the number of inches of dick you sucked to be here today, ‘Wing Captain’.”

A ripple of laughter made its way through the ranks around me. Lucien’s face purpled. I’d have basked in the burn, but terror radiated from Karalti in waves. Her scales, horns and wings had flattened to her body as she made an urgent huffing, barking sound, trying to get her siblings to acknowledge her. Both dragons simply stared right through us.

“Hmph.” Lucien snootily regarded his fingernails, even though he was wearing gloves. “Well, Baldr Hyland, the Warden of Ilia, has sent us to follow up on a letter he sent the king a week ago. He also wants to make you an offer. A good one. Do you want to hear it?”

“I’m all ears,” I called back. “But can you at least acknowledge His Majesty first? Guy’s been standing there for like ten minutes now.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ignas arch an eyebrow.

“Why? He’s an NPC. We’re the players. He’ll do what the story we make forces him to do,” Lucien retorted. “Baldr is giving you a real chance, Hector. Did you know that there hasn’t been a queen with a rider in the Eyrie in close to seven hundred years? Traditionally, the Queen’s rider is the one to take command of the Eyrie, which means that if you come with us, you’ll be named Knight-Commander of the Order.”

My mouth opened, then snapped shut. Of all the things I’d expected him to say… well. “I thought Baldr was the Knight-Commander?”

“He is. For now.” Lucien’s burnt orange eyes simmered with envy and disdain. “But his plan all along was to take control of Ilia, and he has. Besides that, the Eyrie needs a queen, and that is almost ready to breed.”

He pointed at Karalti. She pulled her lips back over her gums, flashing all her teeth, and snarled.

It took every ounce of willpower I had not to hit my Jump ability, leap up there, and try to snap Lucien’s lily-white neck. My mouth sloped to one side in a hard, thin grimace. “I’m… genuinely offended that Baldr thinks I’m that stupid.”

“He’s serious, Hector.” Some of the contempt left Lucien’s expression. “Baldr isn’t just a good player. He’s the best, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned since we started working together, it’s that whatever he wants, he gets. You really should consider his offer. I mean… it’s even lore-friendly.”

I stared at him. “Dude, no. I’m not flying my dragon to your supervillain headquarters and joining your stupid cult. I don’t care if Baldr eats coal for breakfast and shits diamonds by lunch time: he’s evil, he’s a cheat, and whatever hack he used to fuck up your dragons has also fucked with you.”

Lucien’s smirk slowly faded. He sighed. “Look, I’ll try and put this in the kind of simple language someone like you can understand. Baldr is willing to give you, Hector, the second-most powerful position in the Hercynian Empire, if- “

“Pardon me?” Ignas finally stepped forward. “The ‘Hercynian Empire’? Ilia is a single nation and a signatory to the White Sail Alliance. There is no ‘Hercynian Empire’.”

“There is now.” Lucien shrugged and flashed him a rakish smile. “Which leads me to the stick at the end of the carrot. Hector stole this queen dragon from the Order he vowed to serve-”

“I didn’t.” I rolled my eyes.

“-AND he abducted our property to your kingdom, ‘Your Highness’,” Lucien finished. “Which means you’re sheltering an outlaw, and if Hector doesn’t accept your future Emperor’s extremely generous offer, your refusal to extradite this traitor and his hatchling will be treated as a declaration of war.”

“It’s ‘Your Majesty’, and I did, in fact, send a reply. He sent the letter to my brother, who is now deceased. I informed the Warden that Vlachia is not part of Hercynia, and that I consider him to be an illegitimate ruler,” Ignas replied crisply. “So kindly take yourself back to your self-styled ‘Emperor’ and tell him that he can shove his offer all the way up his hooyeh until it comes up his neck and he chokes. I will be contacting the other Alliance members about this proclamation. Be assured we will take appropriate action.”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Violetta’s eyes narrowed to pale slits. Rutha was still draped in her arms, unconscious. A trickle of blood ran down her neck, soaking into the ragged hem of the shirt she was wearing.

“Alright. Suit yourself.” Lucien jerked his head toward Rutha. “Throw the knife-eared whore off your dragon, Vi. Then torch the place.”

----------------------------------------

CHAPTER 3

Violetta shoved Rutha forward. The unconscious woman tumbled over the blue dragon’s frosted scales, slid off his shoulder, and plummeted bonelessly toward the ground.

“Stay back!” I snapped at Karalti and sprung from her back like a cricket.

At the peak of the Jump, I triggered Shadow Dance. They were two of the essential mobility skills of a Dark Dragoon, with Jump allowing me to leap fifteen feet in any direction, and Shadow Dance allowing me to become immaterial and dash forward at the cost of a tiny amount of health. With the right timing, the two maneuvers could be chained together like a ghetto airdash. I vanished in a swirl of shadow, reappearing under Rutha to catch her in my arms. It was a dumb thing to do, a stunt that left me wide open and defenseless. But it was the only thing to do.

I didn’t even see Lucien move. One moment, he was standing on his dragon’s back, smirking away, and in the next, he was up in my face. Swords drawn, face split in an insane, heartless grin.

“Oops.” He drove both blades at my exposed ribs.

[Barrier Shirt negates Heartstrike!]

[Lucien lands a glancing blow!]

[You have taken 1101 damage!]

[You are poisoned!]

[Warning! Your Armor durability is critically low!]

The ancient Tuun chain shirt burst, and splitting pain wracked through my torso, stunning me. Most of my HP vanished like a bad dream. Lucien kicked off my chest, sending us tumbling through the air. I oriented just in time to land on my feet, but stumbled under Rutha’s weight and fell back with her onto my ass. Karalti bounded forward with a roar, shielding me with her body as the pair of dragons drew deep, magically charged breaths.

And Ignas began to laugh.

At the same moment that Lucien vanished and reappeared on his dragon’s back, hundreds of hidden murder holes opened up around the Parade Ground all at once. A forest of cannons and rifles emerged, every one of them aimed squarely at Lucien and Violetta. The dragons froze in place.

The Volod crossed his arms, raising his voice to be heard by the riders. “I don’t know if your enlightened liege is much of a historian, but Vlachia is one of the oldest civilizations in Artana. You really think we’ve stood for three thousand years without being prepared to defend ourselves from a couple of dragons?”

“We’re Level 55. We can tank it.” Lucien sneered. “Vesper!”

“These are Wyrmsbane rounds, boy.” Ignas jerked his head toward the nearest row of cannons. “You’ll get out of the way, but that decrepit beast of yours won’t.”

His words hung in the air. Suri and Rin stood side by side, weapons in hand. The soldiers and knights held their ranks, faces pale, but determined. Fighting the cramping pain from the poison on Lucien’s swords, I stood up with Rutha in my arms.

“Wyrmsbane?” Lucien’s nose wrinkled. His expression turned distant as he consulted his unseen HUD. “Violetta, is that even a real buff?”

She gave him a curt nod, but remained silent. The raspy breathing of the two mutated dragons was the only sound for nearly a minute.

“So, now that we have an understanding, I will ‘advise you as to how things will work going forward’, as you put it,” Ignas finally said. “You, Lucien, will run back to your master like a whipped dog, and you will tell this so-called Emperor of Nothing what I said. I give you my thanks for alerting us to his intentions.”

“Oh, we will. And when we come back with a legion of dragons, you’ll wish you’d never insulted us.” Lucien spat down at me. “Come on, Vi.”

The female rider stared me in the eye as her dragon spread his wings and bunched, then kicked off the ground. The frigid downdraft blasted the courtyard, knocking down the nervous soldiers and forcing the Volod to one knee. Shielding our faces, we watched the twisted creatures rise into the sky before vanishing into a dark nimbus.

“Hector!” Rin’s anguished cry came from behind me. I turned to see her running for us, her turrets flanking to either side. “Are you okay?!”

“I’m mildly poisoned, mostly dead, and I have a cold, but I’m alive.” In all honesty, I was rattled. I hadn’t seen Lucien move. His Dex was up to god-tier levels now… and who the hell knew how powerful Violetta and Baldr were. His ‘glancing blow’ had ignored my armor and would have killed me if not for the improved Spear of Nine Spheres and its +300 HP bonus.

I pushed the pain aside and knelt with Rutha, looking over her injuries. She was slashed with deep lacerations – many of them infected – poorly healed bones, bruises and old blood.

“My god. This poor woman.” Rin crouched down on the other side, reaching out to smooth her hair back from her face. “Who were those people?”

“We’ll talk about it later. Here, Hector. Drink.” Suri held out a fan of potion vials to me: three green and one black. I took them and threw back the [Common Antidote] like a shot, then drank one of the green [Concentrated Moss Tinctures]. The next one I tried to give to Rutha, but it was hopeless. She couldn’t swallow. I took the rest.

[You have healed 450 HP!]

[You are no longer poisoned!]

[HP: 632/1283]

I was still in the orange after all that, but the crushing pain in my sides lifted. The humiliation? Not so much. I flashed Suri a small, wan smile. “Thanks.”

“She’s been beaten with a razor whip.” Suri pointed at the lacerations on Rutha’s skin. “Used to see that in Al-Asad a lot. Whips that had shards of metal knotted on.”

Rin’s eyes were tearing up. “I knew that players wouldn’t always be kind to NPCs… but this is terrible.”

“Strange as it sounds, I think whatever happened to Violetta was worse.” I gathered Rutha into my arms and stood. “She used to be okay, you know? She wasn’t part of Baldr’s clique. Lucien was. He was a weak coward, and now he’s a vicious, nasty weak coward. And Baldr… Jesus.”

Ignas strode up to us, cloak billowing in the wind. “Power is like a magnifying lens, Hector. If you are a good person, it will bring out the best in you. If you are a coward, a fool, or a sadist, having power only makes you more so.” He motioned with a hand to one of the Knights of the Red Star, who bowed and went to one knee. “Rytier, take Lady Rutha to the infirmary, and tell Masha that I command she attend her personally. The Lady was Ilia’s frequent emissary here... I wish to know she is being well taken care of.”

“Hemen, Majesteri.” The tattooed knight saluted with a fist over his heart, then rose and barked orders in Vlachian to his squad.

A pair of soldiers came forward to take her up and bear her away, but I ached with suspicion. “Your Majesty, we must be careful. As much as I care for her, Rutha is mixed up with Baldr. She could be compromised.”

“You question the lady’s honor?” He furrowed his brows.

“No, not her honor. Baldr’s. The Architect that’s possessing him… he’s like a disease that corrupts people, like those two people we just saw. And your brother.”

Slowly, Ignas nodded. “I see.”

I jerked my head toward the retreating soldiers. “Rutha might not be working for Baldr intentionally, or even willingly, but she could still be infected. There’s something about this that feels like a trap. Like it was staged.”

“Hector’s right. There was no reason for them to give us Rutha,” Suri said. “If that little blond cunt was tellin’ the truth and they’re really Level 55, that sorceress probably could’ve waved a hand and killed the lot of us without too much trouble.”

“Curious you say that.” The Volod rubbed his hand over his mouth, thinking. “She lied.”

There was a pregnant pause.

“About the Wyrmsbane?” I asked.

The Volod nodded. “Yes. There’s no such thing, not as such. I mean, there are magics that affect dragons, but they are decided by element. The ruse was a last-minute gamble on my part.”

“Well shit.” Suri looked to the sky. “We’d have been fucked if she hadn’t fudged it.”

Ignas shook his head. “Not necessarily. Ebisa is a match for the sorceress.”

As if summoned, ghost, the unseen assassin stepped out of her Stealth cloak and fell in by Ignas’ side. Ebisa was a Mercurion like Rin, but she was her physical opposite. Most Mercurions were beautiful works of art, but Ebisa was more like an unfinished sculpture. She was rail-thin, her skin a matte flat gray. Her sharp features were hard and hawkish: instead of eyes, she had four gemstones in a band across her face. She always wore a mask in public.

“The riders are not as powerful as their dragons. If they were, they would have detected my position.” Ebisa’s voice was as harsh as a crow’s, rough and husky. “But the Tuun speaks true. This elf was their bargaining chip, and they threw her on the table and left with their tails between their legs. It was too easy.”

“You are a cynical shrew, Ebisa. But yes, indeed.” The Volod seemed entirely unsurprised by her sudden appearance.

“A cynical shrew who has protected your bony Sang’hi ass for long enough to have gained some wisdom,” Ebisa replied wryly.

Ignas snorted. “True enough.”

“You aren’t putting Rutha in the dungeons or anything, are you?” I asked quickly. “If she’s been turned into some sort of trojan, it’s not her fault.”

“Of course not. I will warn Masha of this disease she may be carrying. We will place the lady under guard in the hospital and keep her isolated for the duration of her coma,” Ignas replied. “Much as it pains me to do so.”

Ebisa flowed like a ribbon of smoke to join Rin, who was starting to look dejected. She patted the Artificer on the hip, and the girl perked up, blushing bright blue. “We could keep watch over her for you, sire. Mercurions fear no human disease.”

“You could, but I have need of you elsewhere. Your gift for strategy will be of great use to us. We must have the briefing on Myszno. I’d planned to have it tonight after the Dark Moon festival, but we will have to move it forward.”

“How are things in Myszno looking?” I asked. “The Unto Death quest?”

Ignas gave a little shake of his head, lips pressed together. “The messenger who staggered into the Great Hall this morning carried dire news, now made more dire by the need to deal with this Ilian whelp. I won’t explain out here – we shall adjourn to the War Room. I want all four of you there. Karalti, too, if she can stick her head in through the window.”

“Of course, Your Majesty.” Suri dropped into a courtly bow.

“Sure.” I looked back to Karalti. Her wings were drooping, the tips almost trailing on the ground. She was still staring up at where her siblings had vanished. “If it’s alright with you, we’ll meet you there in twenty.”

Ignas gave Karalti a shrewd look, then inclined his head. “You have my leave. Do what you must. And do not fear these threats of war, Hector. As I told you during my coronation, I will not be extraditing you or Karalti to Ilia. You have my solemn word before these witnesses.”

I turned back to him. “Even if it means going up against Baldr?”

He nodded. “The White Sail Alliance will never allow this Starborn whelp to muster beyond his own borders. Ilia is not a large country, and soldiers march on their stomachs. We will freeze trade, enforce sanctions, and starve any aspirations of his ‘empire’ even forming.”

I ran my tongue over my teeth, considering his words. Even though I could open my HUD and view my Reputation in Western Vlachia – it was up around the +1000 point mark now – I still had to ask the question for my own peace of mind. “Why are you protecting us?

The Volod drew himself up like a dignified heron. “As I told you the day of my coronation, it is a matter of honor. You and your queen brought a murderer to justice and helped to restore me to my rightful throne, and now you prepare to ride to our defense. Vlachia is in your debt.”

“Then thank you, for both our sakes,” I replied. “I mean it.”

Ignas bowed his head, then turned to confer with Ebisa in Vlachian. Suri squeezed me on the shoulder as I walked by her, and I clapped her forearm before moving on to join Karalti. Her nostrils flared as I approached.

“Come on, Tidbit. Let’s fly and talk,” I said, switching back to our silent speech.

“I don’t want to talk. What is there to talk about?” My dragon hissed and snapped her jaws, flexing her talons into the grout between stones, but she dutifully positioned her wing so I could climb it.

“I know you don’t feel like it, but you need to. What’s eating you?”

“I dunno.”

She didn’t say anything else during takeoff, but I could feel the tension in her body as she took wing. Only once we were in the air did she speak again.

“Those two dragons… they were my brothers. I could tell by the way they smelled. What happened to them? I don’t understand.”

“I told you about Baldr, from Ilia. He’s been possessed by one of the Architects, the beings who created this world, and that being – Ororgael – has corrupted them with Void magic,” I replied, leaning with her as she dropped a wingtip and headed back the way we’d come.

“Like the bad king. Andrik.”

“Yup.”

Karalti flew in pensive silence for the rest of the trip to the War Room. Fighting the urge to press her, I tried to relax into the quiet, to make it less awkward, but I was also pretty wound up. We’d been in Archemi six weeks, and Baldr was already the ruler of a nation. Lucien was his high-ranked lackey. If the lackeys and their dragons were Level 55 already, how powerful were Baldr and his mount?

Trying not to sneeze into my helmet, I bought up the EXP table in the ArchemiWiki to check how much experience a dragon needed to reach Level 55, and blanched. Fuck me. That was a big number with a lot of zeroes. Even if Karalti and I had trained from the minute she was born until this moment now, fighting mobs all day and all night, we wouldn’t be anywhere near that. It wasn’t fair, and it made me feel just a little more hopeless about those seventeen points I still needed to level up. But what was the point, when my opponents were so overpowered?

Before the dark thoughts could overwhelm me, I narrowed my eyes and studied Vulkan Keep’s defenses from the air. If Baldr attacked, he wasn’t going to have an easy time of it. There were multiple rings, starting with the bridge over the canyon valley that served as a moat. Then there was the barbican, a fortified gatehouse which led to a kill zone separated from the main castle by another gatehouse, the only way through the outer curtain wall. The wall was partly built into and camouflaged by the obsidian stone of Mount Racosul, the huge dormant volcano that loomed over Taltos below. There was the outer bailey just behind that, a crescent-shaped open space where most of the ancillary buildings used to manage the Keep were located. The inner bailey was built more directly into the enormous natural cave structure behind the castle, which sheltered the keep from aerial attack – an important feature for fortified positions in Archemi. The volcano concealed the strongly fortified living quarters and defensive elements under the direct command of the Volod. The Parade Ground, on the other side of the mountain, was pretty much the only open area and was outside the main walls. Flanking towers were embedded to either side of the inner bailey, the patrolling guards concealed by crenellations along the walls and reinforced caverns from above. Vulkan Keep wasn’t some whimsical Elvish relic. It was ugly and blocky, but it had been built to be impregnable, not pretty. So far, so good.

The War Room was on the top floor of the donjon, the highest tower of the keep. Like the Eye of Sauron, you could stand on the balcony that was shielded above and in front, and look out over the Keep, the parade ground, and the switchback road that ran down the mountain across a fast, icy river and ended at the gates of Taltos far below.

Karalti soared down in an elegant arc to land on the edge of the balcony. When she had her balance, she flipped her wings, folding them neatly against her flanks, and hopped down to the broad catwalk.

“Are you alright?” I unbuckled myself from the saddle, but didn’t slide down.

“No.” Her normally girlish, chirpy voice was uncommonly serious. “But… Do you think…?”

She trailed off, tail lashing, and flattened her crests down against her skull.

“Do I think what?”

The little dragon shook her head, restlessly flexing her killing claws against the stone. “Do you… do you think… my mom is still alive?”

I felt a pang behind my ribs that had nothing to do with the lingering ache from Lucien’s swords. “I don’t know.”

“I never got to meet her.” Karalti began to pluck at the edge of the wall with her dexterous hands, picking at the seams between stones. “My blood tells me that I have to meet her, at least once. If I don’t…”

She trailed off again, hissing softly with frustration.

“If you don’t meet her, what happens?” I asked.

“I tried to command my brothers before. I told them to leave. They should have listened to me.” Karalti replied. “We are blood-kin, and I am their Queen. They should have obeyed me. But there was nothing. It was like… they didn’t recognize me.”

“That’s because they’re Stranged, Tidbit.” I swung my leg over to sit side-saddle, bracing my heel against her wing shoulder. “They’re fucked up from whatever cheats Baldr used to make them level so fast. You can’t expect them to act normally.”

“No. That’s not what I mean.” She darted her head back and forth, then turned around to pace. “My mother has something that she must give me. If I’d been allowed to hatch properly with her, I ‘d be able to command them, Stranged or not. I can see her when I close my eyes sometimes. She gives me something from her mouth and passes the mantle of Queenship to me.”

I frowned. There was a lot about dragonkind I didn’t know, given my strange start in Archemi. “If you’re having visions of her, I’d like to say she’s alive. She probably has to be careful how she contacts you.”

“Do you… do you think she loves me?” Karalti craned her head around to look back. “Be proud of me?”

I reached out and chucked her cheek. “There’s no way she couldn’t love you, Tidbit.”

Karalti’s luminous eyes searched mine, and her horns lifted a little. “What… what is she like? Is she smart and beautiful? She must be, if she has so many males courting her.”

For once, I didn’t want to tell Karalti the truth. Not all of it, anyway. Her mother was obese and sickly, chained deep in the bowels of the Eyrie just as she’d been her entire life. I shuddered to think how she was being treated now, after helping me escape. But despite it all, she had preserved some dignity, the spirit and the will to fight on. Karalti was living proof of her courage, and her power.

I fixed my dragon with a steely glare. “She never got to live the kind of life you have. But your mom’s a fighter, and she’s super smart. If she’s alive, the thing that’s keeping her going is knowing that you’re fat, dumb and happy. And free.”

“Yeah. I guess.” The dragon looked down. “You know, I’m happy that I’m getting bigger, because it means you can fly with me and I can protect you better. But sometimes, I still feel really small.”

The fierceness burning inside me melted a little at her expression. “It wasn’t that long ago that I used to carry you around, huh?”

Karalti’s horns lifted more, and she pressed her muzzle against my hand, eyes wide and trusting. “I miss it sometimes.”

“Me too. But there’s never any point in wishing you were something you were in the past, right?” My smile widened, but then froze as a yellow side-quest notification flashed in the corner of my eye. I pulled it over to have a look, and my eyebrows shot up when my narrator read it out for me:

NEW QUEST: THE QUEEN’S MANTLE

Karalti has experienced a vision of her mother gifting her with access to the Path of Royalty, the Path which unlocks a Queen dragon’s ability to command and lead other dragons. To understand more, you will need to read and research the Solonkratsu, Archemi’s native dragon species.

Reward: EXP, new Path options, Bonus Ability Points.

My guts churned. The reward was good, but that paragraph contained two of a dyslexic’s least favorite words: ‘read’ and ‘research’.

“Are we going to rescue my brothers?” Karalti asked. “And my mom?”

“I hope so. I mean… yeah, we will. Someday. One way or another, we’ll sort it out once we’re strong enough.” Nervously, I accepted the quest and added it to my ever-growing queue. “Maybe Suri can help.”

Karalti rumbled. “I don’t want her help.”

I slid down to land lightly on the wall, then sprung down to the walkway. “We need her strength, Tidbit. The Eyrie is a big place, and when the time comes, we’ll need everyone we can get. That’s a long way off, though. We’re nowhere near powerful enough.”

Karalti spread her wings, letting them ripple in the wind. “Fine, but I’m not running away again, ever. If I see Lucien and Violetta, I’ll burn them to ashes for what they did to my brothers.”

“No, you won’t. You’ll fly back here as fast as you fucking can,” I said.

She turned to glare at me, snorting steam. “Why?”

“I just said it. We’re not strong enough yet.” I held her gaze. “Not by half. You did the Bioscan. You know as well as I do that they’re way, way too OP for us to handle yet.”

“That’s why you kill the humans. They’re weaker.”

“You don’t know that.” I scowled. “If Lucien is anything over Level 20, he could survive a direct hit of your breath weapon, assuming you could hit him. And he is. His ‘glancing blow’ wrecked my magic armor and nearly killed me.”

The dragon hissed, dancing from foot to foot. “I want to fight!”

“Look,” I said. “Just accept that we’re not there yet, okay? You’re Level 8. I’m still only Level 16. Believe me, you’re not the only one who’s frustrated.”

The dragon’s eyes narrowed as she turned her flank to me, tail lashing. “Ugh, whatever. I’m going hunting.”

“Okay. But you’re going to hunt game,” I said. “Don’t pick a cow or goat or some tame dinosaur off the Volod’s land. Challenge yourself. And stay in touch with me while you’re out, okay? I’m worried the Freak Squad’s still hanging around.”

“I’ll hunt where I please. You can have opinions about humans, but you leave being a dragon to me.” Karalti tossed her head impetuously and dove off the side of the castle like a kingfisher before she swept into the air: lean, hungry, and terribly, defiantly young

----------------------------------------

Chapter 4

About ten minutes later, the five of us – me, Suri, Rin, Ebisa and Ignas – were gathered around a great mahogany table in the Royal War Room. The room was still laid out for the meeting he’d had with his advisors earlier in the day, and there were two maps to consider. The first was a huge seven-by-nine-foot map of Vlachia, which hung on the far wall behind Ignas’ royal seat and was marked up with twine and pins. The other was the three-dimensional map of Myszno on the table in front of us.

I’d quickly realized two things. The first was that Vlachia was frickin’ enormous: a million square kilometers of forbidding mountains, frigid taiga, dry steppe and desert. Despite these variations in terrain, nationality and language, it had just twelve provinces. A late-Medieval nation of this size and cohesion couldn’t have existed in the real world, but Vlachia had one thing Earth hadn’t obtained until the 1940s: air power. The territory had been forged by dragons, and was now maintained by airships.

The second thing I noticed about the situation was that we’d seriously underestimated our vampire problem.

The province of Myszno took up about a tenth of Vlachia’s total area, contained within a weird-looking ring of mountains. These mountains were extreme in terms of both height and climate, but that hadn’t stopped the vampire’s army from marching through a narrow, treacherous pass across the border from the south. Three months later, and they’d gone and turned the south-western corridor into a 2500-square-mile goat rodeo, taking over four counties and putting them to the sword. Those counties were some of the most heavily settled regions in the province. Hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost, with every viable corpse reanimated and added to the ranks of the undead. It was a Clusterfuck. Capital C, capital Fuck.

The others in the room seemed to have reached the same conclusion. Rin was staring at the diorama with a confused, wandering expression. Suri worried her bottom lip with her teeth, frowning as she considered the field of purple toothpick ribbons marking out where the horde had overrun the province. Ebisa waited behind her mask, as silent and grim as a graveyard angel. Ignas sipped a glass of amber beer and waited expectantly for our opinions.

Finally, I gestured at the map and slumped back in my chair. “Well, Your Majesty... with all due respect, on a scale of One to Fucked, Myszno is bent over a barrel and Big Dick Bubba is standing right behind it with a can-do attitude and a big ol’ can of goose grease.”

“Eww.” Rin wrinkled her nose.

“How evocative,” Ebisa rasped.

Suri let go of her lip and shook her head. “Hector’s right; this is a bloody nightmare. Tactically speaking, this isn’t just an upstart incursion. This is a war scenario.”

War. Now that I’d spent five years fighting, the word always hit me like a sharp jab to the gut. I never wanted to go back to war, not even in my dreams. Not even in a game.

Ignas nodded to Suri’s words. Despite his bravado in the Parade Ground, it was clear now that the confrontation had taken a toll on him. He still had the air of tough, observant confidence I’d come to expect from him, but his eyes were sunken, the lines around them deeper.

“My thoughts exactly,” he said heavily. “I commissioned a report on my Coronation Day, which we received this morning. By the way the ministers were talking about this issue, I expected that we’d lost perhaps two hundred miles of territory to this creature. But no.” He gestured angrily at the fan of corruption radiating up from the south. “Four counties overrun, over a hundred and fifty villages put to the sword. The Voivode and his entire House are dead or worse, the ducal castle taken... and the whole time, my worthless excuse for a brother sat on his hands. The only reason the Demon hasn’t overrun Litvy and broken out through Vastil Pass into the mainland is because of the Prezyemi Line and the Endlar… and how long can we hold that?”

The Endlar Wilderness was a massive swathe of swampland and forest, unmapped and uncharted. The Prezyemi Line was the huge wall that faced the Endlar’s northern edge, separating the low-land Racsa County – the ducal seat – from the highlands of Vastil County.

“Looks like it. Question is, why is this vampire invading Myszno on the sly like this? What do we know about him?” Suri folded her arms loosely across her chest, scowling in thought.

“We know almost nothing, not even his name,” Ignas replied heavily. “What we do know is that wherever he goes, horror follows. Entire villages and towns are being wiped out. Eyewitnesses say that as the undead pursued those who fled, some ran straight into rivers or lakes and drowned themselves in their panic. Others escaped into the wilderness only to starve. They’d rather be at the mercy of the allosaurus and Kileskus than this creature, who they simply call ‘the Demon’. He is from Napath, one of the Shalid countries. We share a border to the south.”

Suri grunted. “Napath, huh? That explains a lot.”

I bought up my HUD and telekinetically skimmed through the virtual interface to my Archemi databank. “I don’t have anything on Napath in my wiki, other than a basic map.”

“In Dakhdir, we call it Adu Alonwaa, the Land of the Dead. All the citizens are undead of some kind or another. The only living people there are slaves.” Suri tapped the southernmost range of mountains. “Some friends of mine said it’s ruled by a council of really fuckin’ old archmages… old as in, when they were born, the Shalid was still a jungle and the place was ruled by Meewfolk.”

Rin nodded. “The Council of the Breathless. Liches and vampires.”

I looked up at her from my chair. “Aggressive?”

“No. Not until now.” Ignas frowned down at the map. “Lady Suri and Lady Rin speak true. The rulers of Napath are undead necromancers, and their people worship them as gods. The majority of Napath’s citizens are vampiric.”

“Huh.” I nodded. “Could Fangs-a-Lot be a lord from this council?”

The Volod made a go-around sign with one long, sword-callused hand: a distinctly Vlachian gesture that I’d come to recognize as being like a shrug. “He’s powerful enough that we have considered it a possibility, but we do not know. Napath is excellent at keeping secrets. All the court bureaucrats are vampire thralls bound in service to their progenitors. They are functionally incapable of leaking information, even if they wished to.”

“If he’s an exiled Breathless council mage, that’s bad news,” Suri said. “What’s the total estimated figure of his army?”

Ignas winced. “He started with a mere six thousand troops from his native land. But after destroying so many villages and towns, and now the fall of Karhad, his ‘army’ has swelled to over sixty thousand corpses.”

“How many people live in Myszno?” I asked.

“As of last census, a little over two million, including foreigners. But that doesn’t include some of the native peoples and nomads.” Ignas reached out to touch the miniatures showing Egbolt Castle and the fallen city of Karhad. “According to Captain Istvan Demir, the Demon marched over the mountains with a small force of animated skeletons. They decimated villages in the dead of night, slaughtering everyone and everything in their path. Villages and towns in the highlands are often isolated by distance. The Demon butchered the inhabitants in the dark and moved to the next settlement. The army grows with every person they kill. Almost every fallen man, woman and beast is... repurposed.”

“Necromancer’s code,” I muttered. “’Reduce, Reuse, Reanimate.”

“The army then massed in the mountains and poured out to take strategic positions in the highlands,” Suri mused. “Now they’re pushing through the Endlar to the north.”

“Precisely,” Ignas said. “Until now, we never had any reason to worry about Napath. We have been peaceful neighbors since the Age of Dragons.”

“Then something’s fucky, for sure.” I scanned the table. “There’s a village in Myszno named ‘Myszno’ as well, right? Do you happen to know where it is, and if it’s near a landmark called the ‘Thunderstones’?”

“I’ve heard stories of them, but no specifics,” Ignas said. “But I know someone who might. Masterhealer Masha hails from that province. She is Churvi, from the area where the village of Myszno lies.”

“She’s what?” I asked.

“Myszno, like the rest of Vlachia, is something of a melting pot. We’re in the very heart of Artana, and there are many peoples and some two hundred languages spoken across the land. The Churvi are native to Myszno. They bear a strong resemblance to your own people, the Tuun, and I believe their pagan religion shares some commonalities. There is actually a small expatriate community of Tuun who live among them. I recommend you learn all you can from her.”

I scratched my jaw. “Andrik mentioned that there were Tuun there to me once.”

Ebisa, who had been leaning indolently against the edge of the table, suddenly spoke up. “Sire, I must wonder: where is this Demon finding the mana to fuel this invasion? Just the expeditionary force would have required huge quantities of it. Now he’s up to thirty thousand head… he has to be getting that magic from somewhere.”

“That is a question we don’t have the answer to.” Ignas jerked his chin up as he stood away from the table and began to pace. “Myszno used to be a great producer of mana, but the mines of the south dried up centuries ago. The remaining mines are in the north-eastern highlands, in the mountains that shelter Boros. They aren’t getting it from there.”

Rin raised her hand, glancing timidly at Ebisa before speaking. “They could be using Ix’tamo. Stardrinkers… they’re Artifacts that can suck mana out of fertile land. Or…”

“Or?” Ignas regarded her with interest.

Rin glanced to Ebisa again. “Or… he’s somehow gotten his hands on sangheti’tak.”

Ebisa shuddered.

“What’s that?” Suri asked.

“The greatest shame of our people.” Rin was stimming with her hands, linking and unlinking her fingers. “War machines that consume living beings for their mana.”

“What do they look like?” I asked.

Rin wouldn’t meet my eyes as she fidgeted. Her gaze roamed aimlessly over the table as her voice became clipped and fussy. “There are roughly eight different classic forms of war magitech, but they can honestly be constructed to the specifications of the designer… some of them are like powered armor and are designed to be worn or ridden. Other forms are more like tanks, or drones, kind of. All sangheti’tak have a hybrid fuel system, using some elemental mana and drawing the rest from.. uhh… organic matter.”

“Just say it,” Ebisa said. “They eat people. Preferably alive.”

Rin nodded. “Yes… they eat people. Kanzo was exiled because he refused to build sangheti’tak.”

Ebisa folded her arms. “These machines are mostly used in the civil war on Zaunt, where mana is precious. The secrets of making them are very closely guarded by the great Houses. It is absolutely forbidden for them to be exported to sang’hi.”

Rin bobbed her head. “I know that. But the rulers of Napath are old enough that they might still have sangheti’tak blueprints from the Drachan War. They could even have information on the Warsingers, now that I think about it…”

“We’ll talk about that later,” I said. “Let’s stick to Old Fangface here.”

“Right.” Rin cleared her throat with a little ‘hem hem’. “Well, even if the Demon is leeching mana out of the ground, resource management is a core weakness of necromancy and undead forces. The undead must be constantly replenished with magic, and the effort to raise and control an army of that size would have to be... umm... well, astronomical. If we could cut off his supply somehow…”

“I don’t think leeching the magic out of farmland would cut it. The only way this vampire could be building an army that size is if there’s liquid mana in Southern Myszno,” Suri said sharply.

“Umm… okay. Sorry.” Rin shrunk back into her seat.

Ebisa lay a hand on the girl’s shoulder. Her masked face swiveled toward Suri. “Are you a mage?”

Suri scowled. “No, but-“

“Then Rin is the expert here.” Ebisa squeezed the girl’s arm. “Would you trust her opinion on combat? You are the expert on that matter. She is an expert on this subject.”

Rin pressed her lips together, blushing deeply.

Suri sighed. “Fine, okay. Sorry.”

I drew a deep, steadying breath. “How many men do we have stationed in the Prezyemi Line? How are they holding up?”

Ignas gave a short, bitter laugh. “Hah. There are about twenty thousand men who’ve stayed to fight, and probably the same number of deserters. But not only is the defense force outnumbered three to one, their own dead families are now shambling to the barricades and throwing themselves on their spear points. We can safely assume morale is low.”

“What a bloody shitshow.” Suri grimaced, scanning something in front of her as if she were reading. “’Extreme difficulty’. The quest description wasn’t pulling any punches, was it?”

I shook my head. “Noooope.”

“Okay, yes, it’s a little overwhelming, but there’s no reason to give up! Necromantic armies are really centralized.” Rin stood. She was the only one smiling. “All we really have to do is take out the vampire general, and his army will just kind of... well... fall over.”

“You say that,” I replied. “But what really happens when you take out a leader in a war scenario is that their army fractures and splits off into lots of little enemies, not just one. You end up with insurgencies.”

“Normally yes, but Rin’s assessment – while simplistic – in fundamentally accurate in this particular case.” Ebisa unfolded her arms to point at the castle marker in the center of the map. “All of the Demon’s soldiers rely on his magic, his command, and his mana. Cutting those things away makes the undead return to death. So that is our objective – we find this vampire. We discover his weaknesses. We kill him.”

“Again,” I added.

Ebisa snorted.

“That seems the best plan of action. Fortify the defense, then find and kill the source.” Ignas heaved a deep sigh. “But there is a problem. Our Ilian friends.”

Rin, Suri and I all winced at the same time.

“Before their visit, I’d planned to send the entire 4th Fleet to Myszno. Six battlecruisers, ten corvettes, seven legions of troops.” Ignas rubbed his eyes and the bridge of his nose. “But now, we can’t spare them. Despite my cavalier words, the fact that Ilia has come under the rule of a Starborn who is already styling himself an Emperor is a threat we cannot underestimate. The Knights of St. Grigori alone are a severe challenge for even the most well-equipped army. I’m going to have to go back through our records to see how prior kings handled armies capable of fielding dragons, but I can already tell you that depleting a quarter of our Navy would be a terrible mistake. I will discuss the matter with my advisors and see how many men we can spare.”

“Right. Well, nothing we can do about it.” I remembered the 17 EXP I needed to level up just then, and the corner of my eye jumped.

Ignas returned to his seat, his long face drawn with worry and fatigue. “Suri, Hector, I will receive you in the Writing Room after the Dark Moon festival tonight. But please, brace yourselves for bad news. I don’t know how much support I can offer you now, and whatever we have, I fear it will not be nearly enough.”

----------------------------------------

CHAPTER 5

Suri, Rin and I all breathed a sigh of relief once we were out of the War Room and back out under a blissfully dragon-free sky. When I touched Karalti’s mind, I got a flash of what she was up to. She was hunting.

“Myszno’s shaping up to be a hell of a party,” I remarked. “We better bring a case of beer. Maybe some snacks.”

“There isn’t enough beer in the world for this.” Suri ran her fingers through her hair, chest lifting in a way that caught my eye. “But speaking of getting shit-faced, what’s the plan for tonight? Rin?”

“Oh! I was going to go to the University and do some research for the quest and for my crafting, you know.” The little Mercurion was suddenly much more chipper. “Ebisa and I are finishing up some tinkering, too. And tonight’s the Dark Moon Festival, so I guess we’ll be going shopping. The Church has mana auctions where Mage-classes can stock up for cheap...”

“What is the Dark Moon Festival, anyway?” I reached out to Suri as if I would put my arm around her waist. She stepped into the offered embrace with a sultry quirk of the lips and a sidelong glance that made my heart skip.

Oblivious, Rin clasped her hands and bounced up and down with excitement. “Twice a year on the equinoxes, Erruku and Archemi line up in front of the sun and the moon goes dark. Well, I guess it’s not really the moon, because we’re actually the moon, but you get what I mean, right?”

“I’d wondered.” I scratched my jaw. “Erruku kind of weirds me out, to tell you the truth. I don’t think the physics of this planet are totally realistic.”

Rin twittered an anxious little laugh. “Probably. We took artistic license with some things. The eclipse thing looks really cool and I-I think Erruku even has some of its own lore, but we were scheduled to get some astrophysicists to play-test and advise us on refining the skybox-”

“The what?” Suri squinted at her.

“The, uhh… the… planetary mechanics?” Rin flashed her a fleeting, nervous smile. “We, I mean, the Devs… we…uhh… don’t worry about it, okay?”

Suri cocked her head, a red curl tumbling over one of her eyes. “You guys are serious, aren’t you? About the whole ‘the world is a game thing’? You aren’t having me on?”

Rin bit her lip. “I’m sorry, Suri. It’s true.”

“Well if that’s true and you’re really an Architect, can’t you just get up into your God Box or whatever it is and go and crush this cunt in Ilia like a cockroach?” Suri asked her. “Because that’d make our lives a whole lot easier.”

Rin was looking more stressed by the second. “The… uhh… short answer is that I never had that kind of admin access, and that Ororgael isn’t supposed to be able to do what he’s doing, either. It’s complicated. I-I don’t have any more power than a normal player. Person. Starborn player-person.”

The larger woman shrugged. “One day, I’m gonna pin you down and ask you some hard questions. But not now, because this bitch is going shopping.”

I chuckled. “What’s on the menu today? Shoes? Bags?”

“Armor, you dick.” She bumped me with her hip, grinning broadly. “And maybe something nice. I dunno if I want to buy any fancy clothes when we’re going off to a war zone, though.”

“Do it. It’s good for morale.” I gave her waist a one-armed squeeze. “When I went to war, I always made sure I had something at home I wanted to come back to. For me, that was my games, my motorcycle, and this photo album I got from my grandparents. And every now and then, when I had the chance, I’d order a package for myself online, you know? Like a new shirt or something. And I’d send that package to my best friend’s house, so that when I came back alive, I’d have like a year’s worth of presents waiting for me. It’s a good mind trick.”

Rin put her hands to her cheeks. “That’s so sad but… also cute.”

I shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. “Conscripts are like prisoners: you either find a reason to keep living or you die.”

“It’s good advice.” Suri smiled mysteriously and turned in against my body. “On that note. Rin, do you mind just leaving me and Hector while you go do your thing?”

“Sure.” Rin’s eyes were shining. “You guys… um… have… fun?”

“Hell yeah,” I said. “We’re gonna get our faces painted, and get our nails done together-”

Suri kneed me in the thigh. I snortled at my own bullshit.

When the Mercurion was back inside the Keep and we were alone, I spun Suri around and dipped her in my arms. She laughed, and when she came up, she looped strong arms around my neck and looked up at me. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Her eyes were a brilliant golden yellow, veins of color slowly folding in toward her pupils like slow-moving magma. “Have I... ever told you how gorgeous you are?”

Her smile turned a little shy. “Yeah, now and then. Still like to hear it, though.”

My mouth was dry, pulse hammering under my tongue. Sometimes, I felt confident with her, leading the way in our conversations, our lovemaking. Other times, I could hardly believe this glorious Amazon of a woman actually wanted me near her, let alone have me hold her like this. But here she was. “Well, that’s good. I can dish out as much as you can take.”

“We’ll see about that.” Suri sucked her bottom lip under her teeth. “Guess tonight’s our last night off, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Might be the last chance we have to sleep in a proper bed, too.” She pulled herself in close, and rubbed her cheek along mine until she could speak against my ear. “I hear the Dark Moon Festival has an awesome Night Market. Wanna go with me?”

Stupid as it sounds, my first thought was my character sheet – and Karalti’s. If we worked hard tonight, we could probably hit Level 18 and 10, respectively. Still not enough… but better than where we were now. I winced.

“I really want to go,” I said haltingly. “But after that meeting… I can’t. I’m sorry. You’re Level 20 already, but we’ve still got to catch up before Myszno.”

Suri didn’t pull away, but I could sense her disappointment. She planted a lingering kiss on my cheek. “I get it. No worries: we’ll have another chance some time. So… what’s on the agenda for tonight, then?”

I sighed, guilt tightening my chest. “Well, honestly, I was going to go to the hospital and ask Masha about Myszno, then see about learning Vlachian and Churvi. I want to level up my healing skills until Karalti gets done stuffing her face. That, and I need to see how Rutha’s doing.”

Suri cocked her head curiously. “The Lys woman. Yeah… I was wondering how she was, actually. How do you know her?”

“She’s...” I trailed off, not sure how to respond. With most women, I’d have been on thin ice, especially after saying no to a date. But Suri didn’t seem like that kind of person. There was no hostility in the inquiry. No edge to it.

“Rutha was the woman who helped me escape that slave ship I told you about,” I admitted. “You know, the one I landed on when I first incarnated into Archemi? We helped each other out, and she gave me the Spear. We… ahh… had a two-night stand while we were in Liren. Nothing serious, but it was my first time and… I mean, we’re just friends now, but uhh-”

Suri rested her finger against my lips, cutting off the babbling. “That’s all I need to know. When you go and see her, say hi from me. Tell her I look forward to meeting her when she wakes up. Tell her she’s got people on her side.”

“Really?” I blinked a couple of times. “You aren’t... like... mad?”

“I’m mad this Baldr cunt beat the shit out of a woman and used her as a hostage to make a point, sure.”

“Yeah.” The rage I’d felt on the parade ground was still trembling in my stomach and in the muscles of my jaws. “Me too. I was just worried you’d be…”

A small smile quirked the corner of her mouth. “Jealous?”

“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck.

Her smile spread, but this time, it was strangely bittersweet. “I had a lot of time to think in Al-Asad. You know what I realized one day? ‘Evil’ is ‘Live’ backwards. Whoever hurt that woman is evil. You and me, we both know what evil looks like. Real evil.”

I nodded, taking her hands in mine. “Yeah. We do.”

She squeezed back. “Whatever you had or have with Rutha, that’s a living thing. It’s the opposite of evil. How can anyone be jealous of that? So you tell her that we’ve got her back, and one day, we’ll kill the mongrel who hurt her.”

***

Suri and I parted with a long, lingering kiss that left the taste of honey on my lips. I walked to the hospital with a little skip in my step, humming as I let myself inside. The Master Healer was at the triage counter, tending to a giant ox of a man with a grossly swollen hand. The air was thick with the scent of bitter herbs, old leather, and rubbing alcohol.

Masterhealer Masha was three days older than dirt and tougher than boiled leather, with the kind of jaded wisdom gained through living through the rule of three kings and not only surviving, but keeping her tenure. She had an underbite, hard steely eyes, and wisps of gray hair pulled back in a brightly colored scarf. The tiny old woman had to stand on a stepstool to mix potions, pounding a pestle into a bowl of herbs like it owed her money.

“Ah, well, look who it is. His new lordship, Count Tuun.” She spoke in a heavy accent and didn’t glance up from her work as I padded over. “I heard you helped His Majesty fend off those dragons before, eh? Good work. Now, go over there and tell me what you think of this hooyeh’s injury before he dies.”

“No, Master Healer, I beg you. Don’t let me die.” The man panted. He was bright red and soaked in sweat, squirming in his armchair with discomfort. "I-I have a family!"

The old woman turned on him. "I know you have a family, you dolt! I delivered your son. I've had my hands further up your wife's piztar than you have."

I couldn’t help but smile. In a world full of characters, Masha was a standout.

“You’re supposed to go to the doctor before you’re on death’s door, man. What did you do to yourself?” I asked him.

“It was just a scratch on a nail in the stables,” he moaned. “I didn’t think anything of it until now. Please, give me water.”

“No, no, no, don’t give him any water yet. He’ll bloat up like a dead fish and his blood will boil with fever.” Masha shook her head irritably. "Medicines first, then water."

I went to examine the stablehand’s infection. He looked like he was wearing a big red baseball mitt. “Staph infection, right? That's a... sanguine disease?”

“Correct. A sanguine disease from the feces of the hookwings in the stables. Do you remember the difference between sanguine and choleric diseases?”

“Sanguine is hot and… moist? Sanguine diseases are things like blood poisoning or liver failure. Choleric diseases are hot and dry, and attack the skin and muscles, right?”

Ting. My HUD chimed as I gained a small amount of Skill EXP toward Field Medicine. Masha nodded. “Correct. You’re smarter than you look. Now, take his temperature.”

I unequipped my right gauntlet and put a hand to his forehead. Assessing temperature through touch was a Level 1 Field Medicine ability. I was at Level 3 now, so I got an auto-success. “He’s burning up. That’s got to be at least a hundred and five degrees. He’s at risk of organ failure.”

He whimpered. “Khors have mercy.”

“If the gods had mercy, there’d be no need for doctors.” Masha stirred in clear alcohol, the smell stinging my nose from across the room. “This fever is not so good. Give me a moment.”

I knelt next to the man’s chair, and soon enough the healer came bustling over with a poultice and three bottles of potion: one yellow, one green, and one blue. The blue potion emitted a faint glow. She set the alchemical brew aside, and uncorked the herbal medicines. “Now, what do we do first?”

“Lance the abscess and drain the wound,” I said. “Then the yellow po… "

"No!" Masha slapped her hand on the counter. "Wrong!"

"Oh, right. Sanguine’s hot and moist, so you have to... dry it out and cool it down," I said. "So we lance and apply alcohol to dry it, then the poultice to cool it, then give him the potions. And water after that?"

“Correct. You do not want to give a man fluids for a sanguine condition. This is a Concentrated Oil of Garlic poultice. It will remove the Blood Poisoning status effect.” Masha took a clean scalpel from her apron pocket, dunked it in a small vial of alcohol, and swirled it around. “You need garlic oil, red rashovik, and activated charcoal to make it. You simmer the rashovik in the oil until it turns bright scarlet, then add the charcoal. Mix, wrap, drain the wound, then apply it straight on.”

[New Herbalism recipe learned! Concentrated Oil of Garlic poultice]

Archemi didn’t have any healing magic – at least, not healing magic that was available to players. Instead, it had a comprehensive medical crafting system comprised of four interrelated skills: Field Medicine, Surgery, Herbalism and Alchemy. Herbal potions could restore HP, cure common debuffs, or give buffs, and they were safe to use on NPCs. Alchemical potions contained mana, monster parts, and other magical ingredients. They could heal critical injuries, regrow limbs, raise the dead or create mutant dragon riding smartasses like me, but most normal people – read, NPCs – couldn’t consume alchemical potions without a risk of being fatally poisoned. The four healing skills were closely interlinked. You had to sometimes perform a surgery, then apply a potion. Properly diagnosing a patient using Field Medicine made them more likely to survive surgery and/or an alchemical healing process. Scientific advances in the field were possible, and were rewarded by the game. I’d never considered a medical career in the real world, but Archemi made it kind of fun, in a survival crafting-kinda way.

I watched as Masha dabbed a sticky white substance onto the man’s hand, waited a few seconds, then began to cut into the numbed flesh. The stablehand lay there, sweating and squirming as she squeezed pus from the infected area. I watched her flawlessly play the required minigame, following a series of holographic directions that showed her what to squeeze and when. Once she cleared it, she applied the poultice. A Status meter appeared, counting down from 60 seconds. At the end of the minute, his Blood Poisoning debuff vanished.

“Now we give the potions. This is Goldenseal Tincture. It cures fever.” She swirled the yellow bottle around, then put it to the man’s lips. “Drink it, and no whining.”

I glanced down at the other two. “What's that alchemical potion?”

"That is Bloodmoon Decoction.” Masha held the man’s head as he grimaced and sputtered. “If our hard worker here turns up his heels and dies, I’ll pour that one down his neck. It restarts the heart, purges blood clots and fluids from the lungs and brain... but it’s dangerous, like all alchemical medicine. If it doesn’t Strange the person drinking it, it will blind them. One hundred percent. All the blood vessels in the eyes burst and turns their eyes red. You can always tell someone who drank Bloodmoon and lived to tell the tale.”

Her patient shuddered. “I’d rather die, Master Healer.”

“You were begging for your life just a few minutes ago! So which is it? And before you tell me a life without eyes is no life at all, what about your children?” Masha scolded. “The Volod will give your family a pension whether or not you’re alive, but your son will prefer a blind father than no father at all.”

I sat back and watched them bicker, but as the stablehand’s status effects ticked down and then vanished, he got noticeably better. His fever broke, and then his hand began to look less critical.

“Alright. You take this second Goldenseal Tincture before you go to bed. Yes, it’s bitter, but you must drink it all.” Masha helped him sit up once the second-to-last debuff vanished. “If you don’t, the Blood Poisoning will come back, and we’ll have to do this all over again.”

“Yes, Master Healer.”

“You come back tomorrow for more medicine, or I’ll send Stanislaw to pull you in by the ear. You’re not Starborn like this strapping Tuun here. You need more than one day’s course.”

The man grimaced. “Yes, Master Healer.”

When he was sent off, Masha went to go and wash her hands. When she returned, the old woman regarded me shrewdly.

“How’s Rutha?” I asked her.

“Not good. Not at all.” She shook her head, rubbing her hands with a clean towel. “Her skull has a fracture, and the join is still soft. She has dried blood in her nose and ears, which may mean there is damage to her brain. There is no miracle cure for brain damage, I’m afraid. She may awaken tomorrow, or she may awaken in a month, or she may never wake up. I hate to say it, but she is now in the hands of the gods.”

I looked away for a moment. “Can I see her?”

“I want the medicines I gave her to settle in her blood before I let any visitors in,” Masha replied. “But that will not take long. You can stay here, keep yourself busy.”

“Actually, Ignas recommended I see you," I replied. "He said that you could tell me about Myszno. And I was wondering if you could teach me Vlachian, maybe Churvi as well."

The old woman cocked her head with birdlike curiosity. "Churvi? Why would you want to learn that?"

"I want to fit in.” I shrugged. “Also, I have a hunch that my honorary noble title might become less honorary, more practical.”

"Hmmph. A Tuun turning to landed gentry? Even with your dragon and your fancy spear, that would not go down very well with the other great houses of Myszno. But my people… if you show an interest in our ways and honor the borders of our lands, that might be a different story. Yes, I can teach you Churvi - Khel Khammun, as it's properly called. I can teach you Vlachian as well, and it is wise that you ask to learn from me. The Vlachian spoken in the East is a different dialect from the capitol. They do not speak your White Sail Alliance pidgin there, either: you must be fluent. People in the big city will think you sound rural, but the inhabitants of Myszno will take to you faster if you sound like a local."

"Figured that might be the case. I don’t give a shit what people here think." I bought up my character sheet to check my available skill points. After my last level, I had four remaining. "How many points do I need?"

"Three for basic fluency in Churvi. You already know some Vlachian, so you only need two points to become fluent in that tongue."

I winced. "Damn. Only have four."

Masha thought for a few moments. "Then I can teach you enough Churvi to survive, and you can learn the rest while you are there. Once you have a start in a language, you can invest a point here, a point there... by practicing it, you will also improve without the need to invest points – though that takes more work. Of the two, I dare say that Vlachian is more important."

"Yeah, it is." I nodded. "Official language and everything."

Masha gave a curt nod, and a prompt jumped in the corner of my eye. I pulled it over, and a holographic trade screen appeared between us. Before I could make my selections, I got a tutorial prompt.

[Do you wish to learn more about Language Skills and Abilities?]

"Yes," I thought back.

The prompt unraveled into a tutorial pane, which my HUD narrator read to me:

LANGUAGES IN ARCHEMI

Archemi is a diverse place, with several major sapient species and hundreds of organically generated regional languages and cultures within the five basic playable races: Artanese Humans, Dauntan Humans, Lysian elves, Meewfolk and Mercurions. To learn a new language or dialect in Archemi, you must spend skill points to gain initial fluency, and from that point, you must study and practice speaking, reading and writing your new language to gain mastery.

The skill point cost and practice time is automatically calculated on the difficulty of the language relative to your intelligence score and the languages you already know. You can often spend fewer skill points if you are willing to put in more time practicing. If you urgently need a language to complete a quest or travel to a different country, you can spend more skill points to gain fluency more quickly. If you love to study and learn without spending any points, you can do that too!

Language acquisition using skill points is faster, anywhere between one to ten minutes. You may experience a brief sensation of dizziness and a warm feeling in your temples as Archemi's GNOSIS system uploads the language and primes your brain to be able to speak. As this is the Beta testing phase of Archemi Online, you should report any adverse symptoms to your supervisor. Revisit our Health and Wellness TOC for more information on GNOSIS.

I frowned. That was weird. None of the other skills I'd learned, or my fantasy combat abilities had needed a disclaimer. "Can you hold on for a moment?"

Masha shrugged, and waited while I PM'd Rin. "Hey, sorry to interrupt you, Admin Girl, but why is there a TOS health advisory for learning new languages via skill points?"

"Oh, it's nothing to worry about," Rin replied absently. "There were some problems with language processing during alpha testing. I guess the company lawyers made us include it."

"What… kind of problems?"

"Scrambled speech, mostly. People would mix up the fictional languages with their native tongues when they were offline. That was during the civilian game testing phase, mind you. As it turns out, uploading linguistic fluency to the brain is REALLY complex, but the Creative Design Board were adamant that we needed multiple languages for immersion and marketing down the track. You know... it gives players the feeling of being in a kind of club or tribe if they have a language only Archemi players can speak. I heard the military had a huge problem with memory loss in the early days."

"You mean like Suri?"

"I don't know. Maybe. Listen, I-I've got to go... I'm in the middle of crafting medicine packs for me and any other Mercurions in Myszno. Don't worry about the language stuff. You're safe: it was worked on a lot before the beta testing began."

"Right. Thanks." Not exactly reassuring, but I didn't have much choice: not if I really wanted to sort out the Myszno situation. Sighing, I waved the PM window aside, and selected my languages. "Vlachian first. Teach me the Myszno dialect."

Masha nodded, and then looked away with an expression of intense concentration on her face. A few seconds later, I got a prompt.

[Would you like to learn your new language: Vlachian (Eastern)?]

"Yup."

[Starting upload. Please close your eyes and minimize sensory interference during the transfer.]

It occurred to me then that the Ryuko Corporation might not have tested language acquisition on people who’d been perma-uploaded to the game, but there was no time to ask before the upload began.