My eyes are up here
Suddenly, the glowing eyes flashed in her direction, and the spotlight lit up the water around her. She knew that though her cloak was good enough to fool the eye in low light, she was now completely exposed. She kicked off the tree and sank beneath the river just as a volley of silver arrows streamed past her and vanished in the deep dark. The surface glowed above her from the light like a full moon as she let the current take her. Giant stars of ice, spiked orbs appearing suddenly and expanding in place, broke out everywhere around her and grenades boomed just above her head.
She swam until the water warmed and the sounds softened, but just as she was about to come up for air, a massive section of burning oak fell into the river above, its limbs bubbling and burning below the surface. It was fifty feet wide and even with the swift river current it took her half a minute to pass under it. Though pain and suffocation were distant signals in the Otherworld, even when locked into a gameworld avatar, a bolt of dumb fear ran through her.
The sensation only added to the beauty. The water on her skin, the firelight beaming down to the sand, the shimmering surface of the river, the adrenaline running through her, an experience crafted purely by mind. Even the bodies, floating silently towards the bottom or rushing over her and bursting into flames on contact with the sticky dragonfire, were a marvel. A vessel for souls to commune with an artificially physical world. An echo of the myth of creation.
Here, alone, undisturbed, protected, she let her Real self, the Lindsey that had read every fantasy book in the library, those glossy covers and raised titles, images sparking fantasies that the books almost always failed to live up to, racing her brother to see who could finish them first. The Lindsey that faded into an ill defined world of dragons and magic whenever daydreaming, but had never found out how to make them any more real, never quite made the jump from scenes to story. And later, the Lindsey that had deleted every paragraph and regretted it after, but never found the time, between the work and travel and everything else, to try again.
Here, she tried to let that Lindsey see, through the dense veil of the Spirit, a world like those she had spent a lifetime dreaming of.
But still, even this one came up short.
“You can make something better. You can do it. Just write it down. Just start now. Write anything.” She tried, for the millionth time, to tell herself, hoping against hope that the Real Lindsey would hear her, somehow, and try again. But she had hoped for so long, and every morning that other her got up and blew through another day with nothing spared but daydreams.
She came up for air and with a kick-propelled leap she trapped a pocket of air in the leather vest worn over her chest mail and sealed the bottom with a tug of strings. She lifted herself up onto the bag and looked around. Nothing but hazy darkness. The air was heavy with smoke and her nightsight monocle couldn’t see through it, one of the glaring quirks of game balance. Her cloak made it worse, so she threw her hood back and lifted herself up on the air bag, and got her bearings.
Through the soft glow of her monocle, she saw the land rise into a dark hill to her right, towards the south. She recalled that the riverbed met with the greater river after swerving northeast around the cluster of hills. That couldn’t be more than a mile from here. The lower portion of the river would be swarming with Cloth force ships by now, and would take her south, away from her preplanned rendezvous in the north.
She kicked towards the left bank. The water rushed in her ears. Phantoms of screams and distant explosions reminded her the war was still near. She smelled fire and the beginnings of rain. With her monocle still in one eye, half the river glowed like a full moon had descended right above her head, and the other half was dark everywhere but the pockets of smoldering dragonfire.
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She got halfway to the shore before an alarm went off in her head.
Her avatar was something like her thirtieth, but by far her most successful. One of its most useful features was the ability to know when she was being watched by anything of humanoid intelligence or above, granted the creature was not under the effects of a deity level spell specifically designed to counter such an ability. It had cost her a lot at creation and limited her playstyle. Knowing that someone was watching you was worthless if you fought out in the open and never did any sneaking, but it had saved her during multiple assassinations and retreats.
She had trained it at later levels to have a mild directional component. Right now, it was telling her that someone was watching her from directly above.
She stopped herself from looking up. A few seconds later, she wasn’t burning to ash, so it probably wasn’t a dragon. She sensed the direction shift in a curved route, and wracked her brain.
A bird wouldn’t set off her sense. Must be someone skinwalking or a flying humanoid. If it’s a bird, or some kind of flying familiar, they must be waiting for her to get to shore to attack. Even if it’s a flying avatar, they must not want to strike in the water. Either way, she was sure they didn’t know that she knew they were watching, which gave her the edge. Now she could—
“That was quite the daring leap you made earlier! Never would have expected you to take on the magi face to face.” The voice tickled her ears and sounded like the speaker had given it some artificial bass. Despite the shock of a sudden voice, and the panic of being seen trained into her by a year and a half in a stealth avatar, the voice was less than menacing.
It sounded fanboyish, and rushed in places, like he had been holding back speaking for hours.
She didn’t answer. After assessing distance and her surroundings for a few seconds, she dropped below the water and kicked for the shore, aiming for the roots of a dense willow.
“Oh, I’m afraid it doesn’t matter what you hide under. My sight is linked to my mount.”
She came up on the trunk of the willow with bow and arrow in hand, and said nothing. She thought of the tincture in her pouch that would, when smeared on her forehead, prevent telepathic speech of all kinds, but something told her it would be better to let him talk.
There was a long silence. She scanned the surface of the river for any disturbance in the smokey starfield. Some kind of shadow to tell her where the attack would come from. But the longer she watched the more she was sure this wasn’t going to be a normal ambush.
“Oh, if you’re trying to respond by thought, I can’t hear it. Figured I would give you some privacy, you know? You can just whisper and I’ll pick it up.” He was talking to her like he was trying to convince both of them that he had done some great favor for her, but wasn’t arrogant enough to take any pride in it. Something in the back of her mind, her real mind, set off another kind of alarm bell.
After another pause,
“There’s really no need to be worried. Like I said, If I wanted you dead, you would—”
She couldn’t stand to hear him anime-monologue anymore, so she whispered,
“What do you want?” It came out as, “Wadooyoowan”, forest speak, an avoidance of hard consonants.
“Oh, how silly of me. I apologize. In my excitement, I forgot to introduce myself. I am Zadorion, Dragonrider mercenary, currently under coin for the Cloth, but tomorrow—”
She waited a few seconds, wondering if the connection had been cut off, before realizing he had probably shrugged, forgetting she couldn’t see him. This confirmed her suspicion that he had rehearsed his lines, as he had answered as if she had asked who he was, and not what he wanted.
“Hmm,” she said, softly, still searching for him. Though she was absolutely positive he was nowhere near a dragon, he surely had nightsight, and was probably on comms with others in the woods to keep up the charade. If she could—
“Here, lets get a better look at you.”
The tree line across the river exploded into flames as the dragon shot liquid molten fire on a stretch of the river bank a mile long in a few seconds, and everything was lit up like midday. Apparently, whoever had first made the twilight monocle had heard the myth that too much light let into NVGs would blind the wearer, because her right eye stung until she yanked the glass circle off her face.
“That’s better. Well, now that you know who I am, would you be kind enough to tell me your name?”
She decided instead to show him who she was. She slapped her monocle back on, wrapped the twilight cloak around herself, and took off into the forest.