and it was just a golden ring, and he said he’d already spoken the wish and tomorrow the five of us would wake up and be fantasy adventurers together like I’d always wanted. I’d get to be the elf. I started crying right then and there, I just thought, what a relief, because I remembered now how much I wanted it. How had I forgotten that?
Chapter Nine
Hey, Matt, are there any magic swords in the Realms universe?” I asked.
There was no reason for preamble; Matt got thrown these questions. Black Arts didn’t have an archivist. The closest we had was Matt. He did the research to find out what make of Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in 1945, and what breed of horse a Knight Templar might have ridden. He was consistently cheerful, and he was Black Arts’ biggest fan. He’d read every comic book and novel adaptation and was an authority on the past and future histories of the Black Arts multiverse. Although for all I knew, he made up the answers on the spot.
“Oh! Well.” Matt thought a moment, then drew a breath. “I mean, there’s the usual ones, plus one, plus two, that kind of thing. There’s flaming swords, ice swords, vorpal. Silver, not really magic, but it interacts with those systems. There’s Sunshard, pluses against undead. Daemonsbane—obviously—a bunch of other… banes, giants, and stuff. You can make one out of star metal if you have the right equipment, that’s pretty good. There was a place you could find a vibro-sword from Solar Empires, that was just in as a joke. And, well, there’s the Rainbow Blade, has a bunch of different effects.”
I was impressed, by his humility, if nothing else. He always talked as if he were ticking off the obvious points everyone knew.
“Are there any evil swords?”
“Evil… swords…. Nothing comes to mind, not swords, anyway. Staff of the Ancients turned out evil, obviously. The DireSpear. At high level, antipaladins manifest burning swords as a class attribute. I don’t think the blades themselves are aligned, but I can check.”
“Huh. Where would I start looking? Like, Realms I?”
“Oh, man… oh, man. I don’t even know if you could. I don’t know if even Simon and Darren had a copy, or one that would run, anyway. The thing was written in COBOL.”
Black Arts had a game library of sorts, three gray metal bookshelves bolted to the wall between the Realms art pit and the kitchen. They were stacked unevenly with all the collected debris of four or five insular, feverish midadolescences. Rows and then boxes of fantasy and science fiction novels with doubles and triples of anything in the golden-age SFF canon—the Dune books took up their own shelf. Stacked, hand-labeled videocassettes of films someone considered essential reference (Aliens, The Dark Crystal, and Ladyhawke were visible on top), Dungeons & Dragons modules containing scribbled marginalia, Avalon Hill board games, stacks of comic books, an unused dictionary and thesaurus, a separate section for art books, histories of medieval architecture, and color plates of Vallejo and Frazetta and Whelan and Mead and Piranesi.
And of course stacks and stacks of computer games in no particular order. Most of them were in their original boxes, with worn corners and sprung seams after the long, rough trips from home to dorm room to apartment to apartment before arriving here.
Old consoles; the beetlelike curve of a SEGA Genesis; the triple-pronged Nintendo 64 controller.
I picked one up, already dusty and faded only a few years after being state of the art. Quest of the White Eagle. On the cover a blandly handsome teenage boy in a white T-shirt and jeans and an eighties feathered haircut hung in midair, frozen in the act of leaping eagerly from the sidewalk into a glowing doorway hanging a few inches off the ground. He was grinning madly, obviously overjoyed to be getting the fuck out. Behind him, a dark-haired girl watched, lost in admiration.
The boy was already halfway through; his shoulder and arm emerged on the portal’s far side wearing a medieval tunic and gripping a sword. There, the same teenage girl awaited, with an identical expression but wearing longer hair and dressed only in a few shreds of chain mail and a tiara. The back of the box showed an actual screenshot—blocky, pixelated stick figures.
All the Black Arts games were there, a few still shrink-wrapped, going back to 1988’s Clandestine, the official first release under the label. Realms I was the kind of game that never had a