Zone: Eternity's Solace
Location: ?????
Lore: The place between, a sort of transitory waystation where disembodied souls gather before making their entrance back into the physical realm. It bears some connection to the giant orange crystals found sticking out of the ground all across the island, but the truth has eluded scholars since the founding of the Five Rivers stratocracy. Home to the Ouroboros.
Difficulty: None
Restrictions: None
Vannin would have stopped just short of calling the desolate sand-filled wastes of Eternity’s Solace a desert. Granted, it had all of the traditional markers: a complete lack of vegetation, sweeping dunes that crested the horizon in waves, and red stone cliffs reaching out for a sky caught in a perpetual twilight. The word ‘desert’ just held so many negative connotations, and despite his irritation at how often he’d been turning up here of late, Vannin actually liked it here. Hunger, thirst, pain… none of those terms held any meaning in this place, and while the numbness of Eternity’s Solace was functionally no different than the numbness he felt during his movement across the isle of Teravitum, there was a peace here that didn’t exist out in the normal game world.
Had it been up to him, he might have chosen not to leave this place, but no matter how hard he tried to hide, how fast he ran, how badly he wanted to stay, that stupid serpent always managed to find him and send him back.
Shoving to his feet, Vannin slapped the sand from his breeches and looked around. A vibrant ring of orange light stained the horizon in every direction. Not another soul was in sight. Extra empty today. Slow day.
There was watery popping sound, and a prismatic ball of light blinked into existence in the air before him.
“Master!” The orb swooped around him in a series of excited spirals, flashing from white to yellow and back in rapid succession.
Vannin waved it away, not quite ready for the quiet of Eternity’s Solace to be shoved aside by his little daimon’s emotional light show. “Again. Just Van.”
“That Glorfang is a real monster, Master. I tried to help, but it didn’t seem to notice.” D purposefully rammed into Van’s shoulders and chest in the same way it had attacked the Glorfang, but its quasi-substantial body didn’t even register as pressure.
Still, it was annoying. “Stop that.”
D waned blue. “I want to help. Maybe if you get me a body, I could save you every once in a while.”
“I’m not against-”
The blue color lightened. “You’ll have to give me a name first, of course. Something befitting the form you’ll eventually have me take. Or you could help me learn my true name and leave my form up to Fate to decide!”
“I told you, D. Once I get accepted into this guild, I’ll-”
The blue color darkened once more. “There’s the matter of your rather substantial experience debt, though. You won’t be able to learn any new skills, perks or abilities until you clear that up, and at this rate, I’m afra-”
The little orb stopped mid-sentence, jerking in the air as if pelted by a stone. Its white color returned. Vannin stared up at it, expecting it to launch right back into berating him for his mounting experience debt, but the moments ticked by and the little daimon didn’t move.
Finally, Vannin figured a gentle poking would bring him around.
D brightened. “Oh. I was...I’ve received a message from the shadows beyond the horizon.”
Vannin frowned. It had been a while since D had used that particular turn-of-phrase. ‘Shadows beyond the horizon’ was code for ‘development update’, though why they couldn’t just come out and say that…
“I’m having a little… trouble reading it, Master.” An unusual amount of uncertainty colored its tone, as though Vannin had caught the daimon in the middle of working over a particularly complicated puzzle. The daimon’s warm glow flickered for a moment, but only long enough for Vannin to think he may have imagined it.
He waved a hand. “Here, just give it to me then.”
“Of course.” D bounced twice, and with a flutter of paper, a sealed enveloped popped into existence and dropped gracefully into his outstretched hand. The textured envelope was sealed with a blot of red wax embossed with a stylized ‘S’. Solace.
Announcing Patch 04.2035.01!
We here at Solace know it’s been quite some time since we’ve announced a patch concerning anything more than simple bug fixes. No real quality-of-life updates, no new dungeons to explore, no new items to collect, no new skills to learn! And while barely a fraction of the existing game has been explored, it’s always nice to have new toys to play with.
You thought we forgot about you, but that couldn’t be further from the truth! We changed the landscape of online gaming two years ago with the simultaneous world-wide release of Teravitum to every existing gaming console on the market, and with Patch 04.2035.01, we’re aiming to change it yet again. This major patch will singularly enhance your daily experience with the world of Teravitum in ways we cannot even begin to explain to you. It has been in development for almost as long as Teravitum has been online, and we are proud to announce that we will finally be rolling it out in less than one month’s time! Expect improved NPC communication and behavior, better and more loot, improved game mechanics, new skills, and more!
More details will be released as the patch draws nearer, but we felt it important to warn you: a patch of this size will undoubtedly introduce some unexpected gremlins, so come patch day, while we won’t require players to log out of their accounts while the patch is uploaded to server, we do encourage it to help minimize any unfortunate side effects your account may experience.
Take part in the discussion on our forums, and you’ll always find yourself… ahead of the game!
Your Developers at Solace
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Unfortunate side effects, huh.” That didn’t sound good. As someone personally unable to log out of the game, Vannin had no way to protect himself against the ‘unexpected gremlins’ of a software patch. Most of the ones he had thus far experienced were small and hadn’t created any real problems for the community. At least, that he’d heard.
But a larger patch? One that touched on what sounded like nearly every level of the game engine? Something was bound to go wrong, especially for someone in his unique predicament.
“What was so hard to read, D? Seems fairly straightforward to me.”
D nudged the envelope. “There’s another sheet.”
Vannin pulled out a second folded sheet of paper, and as soon as he opened it, he realized what had caused D so much trouble.
image [https://i.imgur.com/9ZzFX5b.jpeg]
What the hell? He turned the paper over, but other than the words ‘Patch Notes’ scrawled across one side in a fake hand-written font style, it told him nothing else.
He shrugged. “They did say there’d be glitches.”
“But...those who dwell in the shadows beyond the horizon don’t make mistakes.”
“That was by far the creepiest thing you’ve ever said to me, D.” Vannin stuffed the leather back into its envelope and then into the burlap sack on his belt. Various bits and bobbles earned during his time farming the Battleswine pressed in around his hand, most of them easily recognizable by touch at this point. [Broken Tusk], [Old Shoe], [Broken Tusk], [Torn Cloth], [Rusted Hilt].
He made a sour face. Nothing particularly valuable, but there should be enough there to get me over the 3000 cor entry fee for Ambrosia should my bid to join Edacity fail. He’d been saving for months, spending what little he made from adventuring to optimize his time spent farming mobs and to keep his equipment in working order, and since he had carefully selected a farming spot in a zone with no equipment degradation, he hadn’t had to spend any money repairing his gear in weeks. Ambrosia may be one of the most expensive restaurants outside the City of Rivers, but the skilled chefs also produced some of the highest tier food one could find.
He jostled around in the bottom of the sack, feeling for anything he may have missed. Would it kill the game to grace me with at least ONE Mastercraft world drop for all my troubles?
His fingers grazed something hard and unfamiliar.
What’s this?
When he pulled it free of the bag, he nearly dropped it in surprise.
The item was a jagged orb no bigger than an apple, made of a smokey quartz-like substance brimming with an unnatural light, like sunbeams on the disquieted surface of an algae-choked lake. As he pushed his focus deeper into the item, he could have sworn he heard an angry squeal from somewhere off in the distance. A small popup window materialized, and massive grin spread across his face. The item’s name wasn’t written with the gray lettering of the low-quality items those pigs had been dropping all week, presenting instead with a visually pleasing vibrant blue lettering.
image [https://i.imgur.com/H8uWkrs.png]
Swine’s Esse
Magical Crafting Material
A physical representation of indulgence and earthly desires. A harbinger of new life.
“As we sprang from the mud, so shall we one day return.”
- Bezo Altara, Historian-Druid of Ashaval
Value - ???
Item Level - ???
A Tier 5 magic item?!?!
“Woo-hoo!” Vannin twirled in the air, excited for what felt like the first time in forever. He wondered when he picked it up. Probably during that last push during his fight with the Glorfang.
D practically bounced with excitement. “You found it, Master! That didn’t take too long after all.”
The sands around Vannin’s boots suddenly shuddered to life, dancing and vibrating and cutting him off before he could make some rude comment about the little daimon’s complete lack of temporal awareness. In the distance, a thirty-foot-high rooster tail of sand erupted over the crest of a dune before careening down its angled face, barreling toward Vannin and D at a high rate of speed. A building rumble grew in his chest.
Actually looking forward to the game now for the first time in weeks, Vannin quickly shoved the [Swine’s Esse] in his bag and jogged toward the approaching disturbance. He’d only taken a few steps when the head of a great stone serpent emerged from earth, tilting its massive marble skull this way and that to dislodge a waterfall of sand. It quickly encircled Vannin’s position, coiling around and on top of itself until a cylindrical wall of polished scales surrounded him on all sides. He could no longer see the rest of Eternity’s Solace, could no longer see the orange horizon. He was trapped.
“Come on, serpent,” he urged, bobbing up and down on his feet. “Let’s get this over with. I’ve got quests to complete.”
With the rumble of stone grinding on stone, the beast’s head descended from above, and it peered down at him through eyes of diamond and agate. A three-pronged orange crystal grew out from between those eyes, its color and material precisely matching the one set into Vannin’s breastbone.
Sand fell from the serpent’s lips as it spoke. “Child of Eternity,” it hissed, extending its stone tongue to taste the air. “The forces of Oblivion do not sleep, and so you shall not rest-”
“I know, I know.” Vannin waved the snake into silence. “You can stop talking. I just needed your light. Bend over.”
He reached out to touch the serpent’s crystalline growth, but the snake pulled away. “Your rebirth requires an expenditure of spiritual energy, a sacrifice necessary to instill a new Eternal Shard with your life essence and empower it to construct you a new physical body. I must first ensure you possess the necessary reserves.”
An awkward smile turned his lips. “Oh, right. So, about that…”
The crystal in the serpent’s head flared, prompting his own crystal to respond in kind. After a moment, the serpent lowered its head to glare at Vannin, disappointment smoldering in its multifaceted eyes.
“Your reserves once more fall short, Child. Returning you to the world of form is no easy task, and your ongoing spawn debt will be increased to-”
He cut it off. “Save the numbers. It’s not like it matters.”
“Your debt is harmful to the cause, Child,” the serpent growled, following the script Vannin had heard now more than a dozen times. “Be careful that you do not accumulate too much, lest measures will need to be taken to exact payment for your reckless disregard of our arrangement.”
“Oh, come on.” Vannin rolled his eyes. “You’ve been saying that for months. Really starting to feel like empty threats there, my scaly friend.”
“He seems pretty serious to me, Master,” said D before ducking back down behind Vannin’s shoulder.
He wasn’t actually sure if there was any weight to the serpent’s words, or if they were just flavor text designed to shame a player who had failed to collect enough spiritual energy from their actions out on the island. He’d stopped believing the threats after the six or seventh death with no negative repercussions.
Wow, I should really try getting better at this game, huh?
“What little spiritual reserves you possess will suffice, and I shall lend you a small measure of my own as well, but I should hope that when next we meet, you will have made great strides toward fulfilling your agreed upon purpose.”
The serpent dipped its head, the orange crystal flared to life, washing away all trace of color from the area but the burnished glow of an eternal sunset.
“Touch the crystal and be reborn.”
Grinning in barely restrained excitement, Vannin didn’t waste another second.