You - By Austin Grossman Page 0,92

comments, like /*okay but fuck you*/ or /*but why??*/ or just /*IM SORRY*/. Some of them were written for an aborted licensing deal with the Labyrinth franchise, so there were functions everywhere named things like DANSE_MAGIC_DANSE and DRAW_CONNELLY. The more I played Black Arts games, the more they started to feel like they’re all part of one huge, sinister rat’s nest of fragmented worlds, like bright shards of mirror lost in the tangle.

It was five in the morning and I was playing alone when I got sick of the entire business—the struggle, the mess, the tears of the Third Age.

Leira walked away from the city the Four Heroes had built.

In the long years since Realms III, the ocean had risen and the city was a half-drowned island in a wide, shallow inlet. Weeds covered the great statue of Elbas; thieves had stolen his jeweled eyes. I paddled through the streets and the flooded palace.

Then I left the whole point of Realms IV behind and walked south. WAFFLE could generate as much detail in the landscape as I needed, giving it warmer and greener colors.

Later—I couldn’t really say how much later—I reached the bottom of the continent itself and looked out over the simulated seas of Endoria. Then I piloted a single-masted boat to islands that became increasingly remote. It was late November, and tacking slowly upwind, watching the bands of orange and purple on the water through the night, was better than sleep.

Even at the eastern limit of the world they’d heard of Mournblade; one man claimed his father’s father was killed with it. They said an ancient hermit knew everything there was to know about it. They gave me a map.

I turned when someone sat down behind me; I thought it was Matt but it was only Brennan. He’d been killed a couple dozen times during the past few games, but in the way of video game characters he’d managed to walk it off. Now he sat in an empty office chair with a ridiculous amount of animal grace. He smelled like leather, horses, oil. His hands were dirty.

“Tallyho, gents,” Brennan said sleepily, halfway through a bag of Doritos. He wore a maroon T-shirt with a griffin on the front. “For the honor of my house!”

“Hey, there,” I said.

“You suck at this game,” he said.

“You suck when you’re first-level too, you know,” I said. I didn’t mind Brennan; he’d been through a lot. I’d decided he was in love with Leira, too.

Leira and I found the sage living within earshot of the Last Meridian, where the still ocean picked up speed and slid off the great disk of Endoria and down among the stars. Far out in the mists that rose from below, one could distinguish the Castles of Dawn, where cloud giants lived, but where no one had ever been.

The sage was ancient and wizened but oddly familiar, and after a moment I saw it—it was Brennan, but a different version of him, impossibly aged. I glanced back at Brennan, who was watching himself on the screen in the video game he also lived in. He was mesmerized.

“I was there,” the Brennan-sage told us. “We all were, down in the tombs at the end of the Age. Me, the elf, the mageborn, and you, too, Princess. We beheld Mournblade, and it was the wizard who first betrayed the fellowship. He called things from the stone to bind us. After that it was each of us for ourselves, you understand? Mournblade was too much to resist, the idea that we might accomplish all our primary quests and rule the Fourth Age. We fought up and down the levels, hide-and-seek, the four greatest heroes of the age.” He spat and continued. He let his gray hair fall to one side and showed his missing eye.

“You gave me this mark, Princess. You thought I was done for—but I was warded. I finished the wizard, held his mouth shut while I put the blade in. He took a few of my fingers with him—the old man showed a little grit in the end.

“After that, I saw what you and Prendar had done to each other, and I ran for it. The Soul Gem took me back in time, all the way back to the start. The black blade is down there in Adric’s Tomb, yes, it is, along with a thing that wields it like fury. Don’t go, Leira. None of us should. Let Mournblade lie there forever and let the Third

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