to fall into.
He wasn’t much of a gamer himself. He hadn’t had the option as a kid, so he’d never programmed his mind to crave it. But his Marine buddies had introduced him to it late, during his deployments, and he’d learned to enjoy it. It was good for killing down time, and for not thinking about bad things. Always a useful tool.
Elisa had come to grief again, judging by the crescendo of profanity coming from her gamer console. She pounded the table, making her empty, chocolate cake-smeared plate slide to the ground, clattering and bouncing.
“What is it now?” he asked.
“Dead again,” she snapped. “I tripped on a snare in the fucking Canyon of Shadows. Dumped an avalanche of rocks down on myself. The bandits are feasting on my broken body right now. Someone’s chomping on my avatar’s leg. Disgusting.”
“Don’t take it personally. You made it farther this time than ever before. You’ll get through the Canyon of Shadows this time. It’s killed you how many times now?”
“Three. But I hate losing the time,” she bitched. “You’re levels ahead of me now. Damn, this shit is hard.” She gulped cold coffee. “I can’t believe how I used to lecture Josh for wasting his time on video games. Now I wish I’d been playing with him.” She looked at the screen, and winced. “Oh, lovely. They’re eating my insides.”
“Don’t watch, just respawn,” he urged. “Get right back up on the hograt.”
“Those game designers are a bunch of degenerate psychopaths,” she muttered.
The longer they played, the further the real world seemed to retreat from them. Day darkened into evening without them noticing. Neither of them even thought about dinner.
At a certain point, Nate was so much further ahead that Elisa abandoned her console in disgust and dragged her chair over to watch Nate’s screen as he played. He was deep in the Ebring Fei Desert, making his way carefully up the dried out riverbed that would lead to the Godringer Cleft, or so they had been instructed by Craig, and in the YouTube gamer videos. She caught her breath as he dodged a nest of crystal vultures just in time to avoid being torn to pieces and fed to the hungry hatchlings.
Nate’s avatar swiftly sprayed a canister of poison at the nest of fuzzy, bobbing heads and snapping, hissing beaks and spurred his hograt to lurch on past them, leaving the hatchlings writhing in their death throes.
Then Elisa straightened up. “Oh God.” Her voice shook. “The cairn of rocks. The dead tree that marks the spot. Craig talked about that.”
“Yeah.” He turned his avatar in a circle several times before he saw it. A jagged fissure in the towering cliff. It was barely visible if you weren’t looking for it, but at the bottom of the tumbled rocks on the level of the riverbed, the crack widened slightly at the bottom into a low, narrow cave.
At that point, it finally became clear to them why they were stuck with the unprepossessing hograt. It was the only mount small enough to get inside the cave, and once Nate had maneuvered the beast into the tiny opening, and lit the lanterns, they saw that the cave was a chasm, a canyon in the dark, too deep to see the bottom.
The only way inside was down a crumbling, barely-there roadway that hugged the sheer rock face. It wound down and disappeared into the darkness. But at regular intervals, large chunks of it were crumbled away to nothing.
The hograt’s thick, kangaroo-like hind legs could jump over the gaps in the path. Therefore, the only possible way down into the cave was by hograt.
Nate descended slowly and carefully. Too exhausted to face the thought of dying, respawning and having to go through the canyon and its perils again. Elisa was perched on the edge of her seat, rocking slightly, her knuckles in her mouth.
Crawl…hop. Crawl….hop. Crawl…hop. Slow and easy.
When he reached the bottom, he found himself on the banks of an underground river. His avatar and the hograt bounded from one huge, tumbled rock to another.
“Please, don’t die,” Elisa begged. “I can’t take any more of this.”
“Doing my best,” he told her. “Don’t distract me.”
He pressed forward into the dark. The circle of light cast by his lantern was all that lit his way forward. He’d started wondering if he was going to have to buy more points to replenish lantern fuel when he finally saw an eerie glow, far ahead.
“Is that the Obelisk?” Elisa said.
“Please, God,”