and cursed. Darren simply stopped play and brought up the Help file, in which Mournblade had been duly entered, if anyone had thought to look for it. It wasn’t a complex bit of code, just a simple piece of algorithmic hatred:
a) Any attack by a unit wielding Mournblade would kill automatically.
b) Anyone holding the sword would slowly lose hit points, one per two rounds. Not immediately lethal, but a ticking clock nonetheless.
c) Any time you killed a unit it restored two hit points, which meant that as long as you had enemies to kill you had nothing to worry about; in fact, it would prove terribly difficult to bring you down.
d) Once you picked up Mournblade you couldn’t drop it, ever.
There were a few more details to fill in. Mournblade could destroy objects such as siege works, but that wouldn’t restore life to the wielder. And there was a 10 percent chance that it would attack an adjacent friendly unit, even if you didn’t want it to.
Anyone foolish enough to pick up the cursed thing could be an unbeatable champion in war, but thereafter the logic of the item turned grim. You’d end up wandering Endoria in search of victims, ultimately turning on the few friends you had left. It was a tiny encoded curse, a few simple rules that, combined in a single item, gave rise to a lonely, haunted destiny.
It certainly hadn’t been in Simon’s manifest when the game began. It was there, it was in-fiction, it was surprising but hard to call illegal. Endoria was still Endoria, but nobody had bothered to delete Adric’s Tomb. All Simon did was find it again, navigating the twenty levels down, past the fearsome &s and putting Mournblade in one of his wanderer’s hands. Then he walked the chosen bearer back up and outside and Mournblade had returned to the world. Then the carrier made the long trek, a hundred hexes cross-country, to Darren’s encampment, murdering lesser units as he went to keep the wielder from expiring as a result of the curse.
Nothing was going to stop the accursed broadsword from reaching its target. The room fell silent, and Simon rested like a virtuoso violinist, letting the final notes of a plaintive, triumphant melody ring into silence. Darren looked as devastated as I’d ever seen him, but managed to shake Simon’s hand nonetheless. The victory stood; the game, and the long summer, were over.
The friendship never officially ended, but Simon and Darren didn’t talk much for a while. They nodded in the hallways, sure, but their collaboration had gone slack and awkward. Darren gravitated back to the tall, buzz-cut kids from the track team, to roughhousing and weekend parties, and Simon gravitated back to himself. But Darren’s father took pity on him, maybe, and set up an office for Simon in the garage, and bought him his own used C64. He sat up late that first Indian-summer night with the crickets buzzing. By November he was there every night, with the door closed and a space heater on, learning to code C properly and beginning what would become his imaginative lifework—the hundreds, maybe thousands of pages outlining the past and future histories of the Realms worlds. Time lines, city maps, histories, sagas, encyclopedic descriptions of imagined countries and planets, floor plans, character sketches. He developed a mild addiction to clove cigarettes. He once alluded to those months as the happiest in his life.
PART IV
THE THIRD AGE OF THE WORLD
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The mild summer stretched on into September. Each day the clouds piled up and rolled over Cambridge like a slow, soundless wave, but there was no rain, only a faint haze that made objects and buildings seem to be enormous distances away.
The first alpha phase began on September 1, 1997, and was expected to run three or four months. Programmers would try to hack new features into the old engine under Lisa’s direction, while she got together the rendering module that would give Realms its bright, next-gen new look. Meanwhile, I would shepherd the other designers through building the first areas of the game to try to get something decently playable together—early versions of the game maps that we could run around in, testing puzzles and combat. By the end, we’d hope to have the first third of the game built.
Usually I would walk the two miles to work, letting cars whoosh past me. I thought ahead, mentally setting up an agenda for the morning leads meeting. It was an unfamiliar feeling,