the Third Age, my screen blanked itself and the map was simply replaced by a tally of personnel, wealth, and territory. I’d never seen the Game Over screen before; I didn’t realize what it was until I saw the entire room looking at me. Darren stood and led a brief, respectful round of applause. The bandit king was dead, and I didn’t even see it happen. I was too shell-shocked to feel the sting of it yet.
It wasn’t either Darren or Val; they were obviously dumbfounded, and Simon didn’t even look up. Spooked, they nonetheless rushed to claim the eastern forestland I’d been stalking since year one. Ultimately, Darren was simply better placed for it. Inside two turns he was cutting timber, building siege engines, and ridding the world of evil at an admirable rate. Val fell back to the mountains, still contesting the field but already looking done. Simon was still technically in the game, which meant that attrition hadn’t claimed all his wanderers yet. But short of a miracle, Darren was going to be the Realms II champion of KidBits, Western Massachusetts, and Planet Earth. I felt unexpectedly disappointed. He already acted like this belonged to him and had for weeks; he shouldn’t have it. I wanted it to be Simon, but his game looked like a preemptive concession.
The bitter fighting in the mountains was all but over, and on the very same turn that the spider queen fell, the tattered sons of Simon’s horde came into view of Darren’s rear guard. I think we all assumed that Simon was now sportingly presenting himself for termination so as to let the game end.
Darren’s forces met him on the field, the king personally commanding. Simon’s people had stats as individual fighters, but the king’s escorts were all elite heavies of their type, and they outnumbered Simon’s entire country.
The sides touched and bodies began piling up, and then Darren’s left flank began falling in on itself, its numbers swallowed as if a black hole had formed in its ranks, centered on a single fighter. Darren ID’d it. A star indicated that it was Simon’s sovereign unit, his king, inexplicably placed at the front lines.
Simon’s king was an apparent nobody, a midlevel fighter in a half helm, wooden shield, and chain mail. But listed in the weapon slot was a piece of inventory called Mournblade.
The room was on its feet in a babble of voices. Out of sixty-three campers, no one failed to grasp the grave provenance of that eloquent portmanteau.
Mournblade. The author Michael Moorcock wrote a series of novels starring the antiheroic Elric of Melniboné, the last king of a doomed race, a tall albino with long hair and amazing cheekbones and a hereditary frailty owing to his weak, rarefied, inexpressibly noble blood. Isolated by his gloomy destiny, he wanders through a world torn by an endless war between Law and Chaos. He also carries a huge, extremely handy black sword carved with eldritch runes called Stormbringer, a sword that absorbs the soul of anyone it kills and gives Elric the strength to get through the day. It’s horrendously cursed, of course; in fact, it’s really a daemon that will one day devour him. (In the plus column, in the far, far future, as the solar system goes into decline, Stormbringer will have absorbed so many souls that its energy will be used to reignite the dying sun and save humanity.)
I was extremely murky on the rest of it, but I did remember that Stormbringer had a duplicate named Mournblade, an equally powerful but apparently less ambitious cousin that wandered in and out of the various books on its own business, which was rarely explained.
Why shouldn’t Simon use it? He probably had Excalibur, Glamdring, Durendal, and the Sword of Shannara wandering around in there, too. But the one he wielded had to be Mournblade—it was black and uncanny and runic—but more than that, it fit Simon. I could just see him lying in bed staring up at the ceiling and thinking “God, I am so Elric,” having the inner certainty that on some level he was the lonely king of a lost people and a land that was no more.
Loose in the world, it was just a tiny icon of a standard broadsword, with a black border and a tiny squiggle or two on the blade denoting the fact that it was deeply incised with obscene carvings and cryptic runes. It was Endoria’s first artifact-class item: unique, overwhelmingly powerful, storied,