After the funeral, there was not much for me to do. As for the Hornies outside, we hoped they would in due course tire of waiting for the entryways to open.

But the Hornies were apparently very determined. Through pin holes near the entrances we could observe them. They had set up skin tents in front of the village. The king of the Hornies, who wore a crown made of animal bones, would leisurely move about his soldiers.

The king, I observed, was frequently accompanied by another Hornie who did not wear any clothes but was dressed in tattoos from head to feet. This particular Hornie also carried a staff with himself and walked with a slouch. The Skhites informed me that this individual was the shaman of the Hornies. He was also the chief advisor, and there was a strong possibility that it was he who had advised the king to attack the Skhites.

As the days passed, I became more and more worried. My ministers did not help. The stores of food and water were slowly depleting. The Skhites grew increasingly disheartened. Even the children looked gloomy.

For great lengths of time I would retire to my chamber and ask my guards to bar anyone from coming near me. It was the only way to keep myself sane. The crown was becoming heavier. Eventually my chamber began to feel like a lock-up of sorts. In fact, the entire village had essentially become a detention center. Nobody could get out of it. No wonder the Room of Power was located deep inside the village so kings would use it only as a last resort.

And then one morning, a few weeks later, the entrances reopened. Once again the Hornies barged in, bringing their artillery with them. I had asked my soldiers to stay at strategic locations near the entrances which allowed them to repel the attack efficiently, buying me time to go to the Room of Power from where I closed the entrances once again.

That day none of the Skhites were killed. But the morale of the village spiraled downwards. Many troubles were surfacing. Most prominently the food problem. We had less than one-fourth of the food that we had had when the entrances had sealed for the first time. All I could do was ask the Skhites to restrict themselves to a single meal a day, and to be less active physically. Unlike me and the players who had come from the real world, the Skhites were born of the game world of Dharti and they required food in order to survive. It was greatly depressing to see the Skhites lose weight. Their cheeks became hollow, their eyes sank deep and their limbs looked frail.

Somehow we endured the time till the entrances opened again. The Hornies meanwhile remained rooted to their chosen spot. They kept bringing plentiful supplies to sustain themselves. From the pinholes we could even watch them organize wrestling matches for entertainment. On the eve of the reopening of the entrances, I called a meeting with the ministers.

“Tomorrow,” I told them, acutely aware of my grave tone, “we shall all arm ourselves with whatever weapons we have. Man, woman, child. People that are fused, and people that are not fused. Old people, young people. Everyone.”

“And then we kill ourselves?” one of the ministers asked. He was not trying to criticize me. The days spent under siege had sucked all hope out of him as with the others.

“And then we line near the entrances,” I replied, giving him a firm look, “When the entrances open, I shall be the first one to move out. I will ask the king of the Hornies what exactly it is that he wants and that we are ready to give it to him. If they wish, we shall even allow them to search the village.”

“What? Allow them to enter our home, and ransack and rape it while we watch?” another minister said. “The village is our home. It will be the greatest insult to us!”

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I gritted my teeth. I was trying to arrive at a solution and the minister was making things worse for me.

“It won’t be an insult,” I said. “Never shall we drop our weapons. When they enter the village, they should enter with fear in their hearts. And, I do believe that the Skhites abandoned the village one other time in the past, only to return to it later on. You have to realize. At the end of the day the village is just… a network of tunnels. It’s the Skhites, the people, whose lives are most important to me. Now that’s all I would say. If you have a different solution to the problem, then you can put it forward.”

The ministers were silent. So silent in fact that I could hear some of their stomachs groan in hunger.

“Then, that’s decided,” I told them. “Tomorrow we go out. Go inform every single one of the Skhites.”

***

The next morning I found myself standing at one of the entrances. Behind me hundreds, if not thousands, of Skhites were lined up. I couldn’t help but stoop a little from the weight of responsibility on my shoulders. I found it ironic that people even came to game worlds for entertainment. Bust stress? Ha!

My heart was beating fast, my plan far from foolproof. What if the Hornies shot cannon balls at us before I had an opportunity to speak? I thought of the Skhites waiting behind me, weapons in hand. All of them were ultimately mere NPCs in a game world. Mine was the only real life at risk. But I reminded myself that the game world of Dharti was now my reality, as such the Skhites were as real as me. Being their king, I was obliged to do my level best to secure their lives.

A moment of peace came, as I grasped that if I died in the next few minutes then it would be the best possible way to go: as a king who laid down his life protecting his subjects. I thought of Kiara. I thought of my brother Sam. I thought of my coworkers. I hoped that in some other life, I would meet them again. Perhaps in that life I would marry Kiara.

I exhaled as the boulders of the entrance began to rumble. They separated from each other forcefully, giving rise to a significant amount of dust.

A wind hit my face. The morning light that I hadn’t seen for so long attacked my eyes and for a moment I was quite blinded by it. I stepped out into the open. Most of the Hornies had been sleeping, not anticipating that the entrances would unseal at this precise moment. The Skhites watched as the Hornies kicked each other awake and gathered their weapons. Some rushed to get the cannons ready.

But before they could take any offensive action, I spoke.

“We are ready to give you what you want,” I said out loud. “There is no need for any more violence.”

The Hornies looked at each other in hesitation. They did not fire the cannons that they had readied.

It was only at this point that the king of the Hornies came out of his tent. His eyes fell on the crown on my head and on his soldiers waiting for some command from him.

“What do you want from us?” I asked again, this time even louder. “Why do you linger in front of our village? Why all the killings? As far as I am aware the Hornies and the Skhites have been friends in the past.”

Instead of replying to me, the king ran to another tent. In a minute he came out accompanied by the shaman. When the shaman rested his eyes on me, however, he went as though he had been seized by a sudden madness. His eyeballs threatened to pop out of their sockets. His jaws dropped and a shiver took over him, even as he approached me, one timid step at a time, as though afraid that if he approached too fast something might go wrong. Was my being a human really so extraordinary as to create such a reaction on the shaman?

“What do you want from us?” I asked for the third time, this time to the shaman. By now I had ascertained that the shaman was the true king of the Hornies even though he did not wear a crown.

“You… I thought it was an object,” the shaman said, and I was confused whether he was speaking to me or to himself. He suddenly turned towards the king of the Hornies and let out a maniacal laugh. “Ha! It’s not an object! ... It’s him!”

The shaman turned towards me again. And then he did something I had not expected at all. He fell on the ground, his hands clasped in prayer.

“I am your servant,” he said and this time I knew that he was speaking to me, “I am your eternal servant… we all are your eternal servants!”

I turned and glanced at the Skhites standing behind me. But they seemed as dumbstruck as myself and had no explanation to offer.

“Bow, idiots!” the shaman cried to his horned fellows. “It’s him we have been waiting for so long! Bow!”