Forever Fantasy Online (FFO Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  It took everything Tina had to keep the smug grin off her face. Her brother, James, always said she was a bad winner, and maybe it was true, because the urge to rub just one “I told you so” in Garrond’s face was overpowering. But that wasn’t the sort of behavior that would get her new mercenary company a good reference, so she bit her tongue until she came up with something more politic.

  “Thank you,” she said instead. “You aren’t an easy man to please. I hope you’ll remember this when you speak of us to others. Roxxy’s Roughnecks are always looking for good paying work.”

  Garrond arched an eyebrow at that. “You’ve certainly taken to your new role,” he said, sitting back down at his desk. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Grinning at the implicit compliment, Tina turned and headed downstairs to the courtyard, where the rest of the Roughnecks were waiting.

  “All right, folks!” she said as she emerged. “We head for Bastion tomorrow, but tonight we get to sleep in real beds and eat the Order out of house and home!”

  Hearty cheers rose up at that. Tina lifted her fist in reply and turned to lead them toward the fortress’s meal hall, hoping that maybe she’d get a hot rock to eat this time.

  Chapter 18

  James

  James was riding on a magical wagon, and it was awesome.

  Since war was an any-day-now proposition, the brand-new gnoll peace delegation had departed for Windy Lake as soon as possible. Given how gnolls usually traveled, James had assumed this meant running. Then Thunder Paw had rolled out a wind caravan, a long train of wagons chained together and decked with sails so they could be blown across the grasslands by wind magic.

  The Naturalists of the Red Canyon had a tradition of working big magic together since long before the undead. At Thunder Paw’s order, they’d performed a ritual to summon a strong wind from the west. Now, with that endless magical gale at their backs, James was clinging to the railing of the craziest wagon ride of his life, bumping down the old trade road toward Windy Lake at an astonishing, almost terrifying speed.

  At his suggestion, the wagons had been loaded with all manner of diplomatic “ammo,” including tents for all the gnolls who’d come along, exotic food and drink, musicians, and gifts galore. He wasn’t sure if Thunder Paw knew how to use it all, but James felt like he and the new Chief of Chiefs were getting pretty good at backing each other’s plans on the fly. Running peace talks was a bit above his pay grade, but James was delighted to finally put his seven years of Political Science classes to use.

  Since Arbati had claimed the front wagon for himself, James took the chance to hang out with Thunder Paw in the surprisingly spacious Chieftain’s Wagon. With its rugs, sitting cushions, and a heavy canvas canopy, the covered caravan was practically a medieval mobile home. This was great, because it finally gave James a chance to talk with the old Naturalist in a non-life-or-death setting.

  He was delighted to discover that Thunder Paw had an incredible understanding of nature magic outside of the game’s mechanics. Now that James was no longer strictly limited to his class’s abilities, he was eager to geek out about magical theory. They were discussing the finer points of how earth magic grounded lightning magic when James suddenly remembered something that he’d been burning to ask since the night before.

  “Thunder Paw,” he said, moving closer to the old gnoll, who was cosseted inside a nest of pillows to cushion his “old bones” from the bouncing of the wagon. “When we first met, you said you were told about the Nightmare. Does that mean you weren’t caught up in it?”

  The chief nodded. “Me was spared,” he said, collar flashing.

  “So what happened to you these last eighty years, then?” James asked excitedly. “Where were you?”

  “Me not sure,” the chief said with a shrug. “Me go to sleep one night, wake up the next morning in an ancient graveyard in the hills with everyone else. We all very confused.”

  “How many gnolls were there when you woke up?”

  “Most all of Red Canyon was there. Nine out of ten. Only some missing. No undead chiefs.”

  That made sense.

  “What did you do after that?”

  “We went back home,” Thunder Paw said. “Red Canyon was not far. It was a sad return, though. The town was different. Many more undead, and much stronger. They put us back in line before we could rebel.”

  Thunder Paw looked sad as he finished, but James was almost bouncing with joy. “This is huge,” he said excitedly. “I thought this world had been through Armageddon, but if what happened to you happened to others too, then all those missing jubatus from Windy Lake might not be missing after all!” He shot to his feet. “I need to tell Arbati!”

  James thanked him as he left and scrambled over the jostling, bouncing connections between wagons toward the front. When he reached the first wagon, though, the head warrior wasn’t there. “Where’s Arbati?” he asked the driver.

  The gnoll jerked a clawed thumb backward into the canvas-shadowed depths of the lead wagon.

  “Thanks,” James said and opened the flaps to climb down into the dark wagon bed. It looked empty at first, but then his jubatus eyes spotted Arbati in the far back, curled up into a ball behind a crate.

  “Hey, are you okay?” James asked, walking over to place a hand on the cat-warrior’s shoulder.

  Arbati curled himself tighter. “Do you know how many times I’ve died?”

  The words came out in a whisper, and James frowned. Thanks to the Intelligence from his staff, the calculation was fairly simple. He just needed to take the number of times per day Arbati’s questline started, subtract the likely completion rate to remove the times when players saved him, then multiply by eighty years. But while his boosted brain had already come up with a likely number, he didn’t think that was what was actually needed here.

  “How many?”

  Arbati wrapped his arms around his knees. “Thousands,” he whispered. “Maybe tens of thousands. I don’t know. For eighty years, I was tortured and killed over and over and over. First by the gnolls, but mostly by that damned undead lich. He was trapped in the Nightmare the same as the rest of us, but I know he enjoyed it. I’ve thought of nothing but revenge for eight decades. Revenge on the lich, on the gnolls, on the players. But now…”

  He trailed off with a shuddering sigh, and James sat down next to him. He still wasn’t entirely comfortable around Arbati, but it was impossible to hear a story like that and not feel sympathy. It was a miracle the warrior was still sane after what he’d been through, and though James was itching to defend himself and the other players, that wasn’t what Arbati needed from him right now. So he kept his mouth shut, waiting silently until, at last, Arbati continued.

  “Now you, a player, are going to join the Four Clans. We killed the lich and saved my sister, and I, the Ar’Bati, have personally invited the gnolls to talk of peace.” He dug his claws into his arms. “Everything is moving on, but I can’t forget all the times I was skinned alive. I’m still so angry. While I was frozen in place, it was easy to pour everything into my hate and plot revenge, but where do I send my anger now? There’s no one left to take it.”

  The warrior lowered his head with a breath that sounded dangerously close to a sob, and James shifted uncomfortably. He had some experience with counseling, but this was way out of his depth. All he could do was to put an arm around the jubatus’s shoulders and give him an awkward sideways hug.

  Arbati jumped at the contact, but he didn’t jerk away. Instead, James felt a burst of shaking, then another. The quivering reminded him of the time he’d picked up his mom’s traumatized cat from the vet. There was nothing to say, though, so he just held Arbati in a one-armed hug as the wagon bounced down the road.

  Several miles later, the quivering stopped, and awkwardness set in. James was trying to decide if he should let go when the head warrior beat him to it, shrugging out of James’s arm with a self-conscious cough.

  “Can I ask you a question?�
� James said to break the uncomfortable silence. “Why did you call yourself ‘the Ar’Bati’ just now?”

  “Because that’s my rank,” Arbati replied, rubbing his paw across his nose. When James blinked at him in confusion, the warrior scowled. “What? You didn’t think ‘Arbati’ was my name, did you?”

  “But that’s… In the game, that’s what was above your head! It said ‘Arbati, Head Warrior of Windy Lake,’ so I always assumed—”

  The warrior huffed, insulted. “It said ‘Ar-bati,’ and it is not my name. Ar’Bati means ‘head warrior’ in the old tongue.”

  James felt like an idiot. “So I’ve been calling you ‘The Head Warrior Head Warrior’ this whole time?” He pressed a hand to his face as the Ar’Bati began to laugh at him. “So what is your name, then?”

  It took several minutes to get an answer because the tall warrior was laughing too hard to speak. “My name is ‘Fangs in the Grass’,” he got out at last, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Claw Born.”

  “Fangs in the Grass, Claw Born?” James repeated with a wince. “No offense, but that’s kind of awkward to say.”

  “It is a very honorable and auspicious name,” Fangs in the Grass replied proudly. “One befitting the eldest son and next leader of the Claw Born clan. But my friends and family call me Fangs.”

  James sighed in relief. “Right on. Fangs it is, then.”

  “We might give you a new name when you join as well,” Fangs the Ar’Bati said. “It depends on who sponsors you. And before you ask, I cannot be your sponsor because I am your trial witness.”

  James nodded, feeling suddenly depressed. Hearing Arba—Fangs talk about his inclusion into the clans as a sure thing should have been a victory, but getting something as simple as the head warrior’s name wrong for two days really shook his confidence. He tried to tell himself it wasn’t his fault, that he was just exhausted and bombarded by too many new things to worry about properly addressing the angry cat-man who’d been trying to kill him, but this felt like a really important mistake. One that seriously impacted his future here, which bothered him a lot, because James wasn’t sure he wanted a future here anymore.

  As much as he admired the jubatus of Windy Lake, he didn’t actually want to live in a tribal village. He didn’t want to go to Bastion and handle whatever threats and politics were waiting there, either. He didn’t even want to be a magical cheetah person anymore. All James wanted right now was to go home and be in his own skin again with no fur rubbing the wrong way inside his armor, no tail to trip over, and no claws to worry about every time he raised a hand to his face. If you’d asked him last week, he’d have jumped at the chance to live in FFO for real, but that was before everything had gotten so violent, bloody, painful, and terrifying. So real.

  Even now, as he sat in the middle of a caravan full of gnolls on the way to peace talks he’d arranged, all James could see was more trouble and drama. Good trouble and drama that would vastly improve the lives of everyone who lived in the savanna, but he didn’t want to live here. He wanted to go home. He wanted to go back to the world of internet and air conditioning, where you could call the police if someone was trying to kill you. Even if his life there had been awful, at least it was a normal, comfortable sort of awful. Sitting here in the hot, stuffy dark with his whiskers bouncing into his vision every time the wagon lurched, James felt like an alien. Like a stranger, and he was so tired of it.

  “I’m glad you are joining our village,” Fangs said.

  The quiet statement shocked James out of his self-pity. “Really?” he asked, astonished. Given how they’d started, that was the last thing he’d expected to hear from the head warrior. “Why?”

  The tall warrior scratched his ear self-consciously. “Players are unpredictable and dangerous. I used to think that killing you all was the best way to make us safe, but now that I know how badly we are outmatched, I’ve realized we must learn to understand you if we are to survive. I’m glad that you are joining us because that means Windy Lake will have at least one player we can trust, and a level eighty at that.” He flashed James a sharp-toothed smile. “Seems you aren’t weak and useless after all.”

  James stared at him, dumbstruck. Even with Ar’Bati’s gruff manner, the compliment meant so much to him. Almost too much. He was just so used to everyone seeing him as a failure that hearing someone say they didn’t—to imply that he was good, that he was worth something—made his whole body tremble, forcing James to turn his head away before he embarrassed himself.

  “Thank you,” he choked out at last. “That…that means a lot to me.”

  “Good,” Fangs said with a stiff nod, then James felt a rough hand smack his shoulder. “Come on. We’re almost to the village, and I need to be riding at the front so no one attacks us.”

  James nodded then wiped his eyes surreptitiously as they climbed out of the wagon bed and up to the front seat by the driver. He was about to ask Ar’Bati—Fangs in the Grass, he mentally corrected, shaking his head—how much farther they had to go when they bumped over a low hill and the outline of Windy Lake appeared, shimmering in the afternoon heat.

  As to be expected given that they were in a gnoll caravan, a large mass of armed jubatus began forming on the village’s edge as soon as they came into view. Ar’Bati waved vigorously at the distant crowd, but his presence—clearly free and at the front of the procession—seemed to do little to quiet the anger James saw as the wind caravan got closer.

  When they were almost in walking distance, the Naturalists let the conjured wind drop, slowing their madcap speed to a gentle roll. As they slowed, the natural wind from the east took over, bringing the smell of death.

  James and Ar’Bati both froze. They were very close to the village now, close enough that James could see fresh bandages and bruises on the warriors who’d come out to meet them. Shivering, he stood up on the driver’s bench to get a better look, his cat eyes squinting as he searched the village and the land around it for a mass grave or a battlefield, something that would emit such an intense rotting smell.

  He spotted it soon enough. On the southern shore of the Windy Lake, a score of tall posts had been driven into the ground, and tied to the wooden poles like scarecrows were bodies.

  They were clearly fresh. The blood on their clothes was still red, not oxidized brown. The carrion birds had already moved in, covering the bodies in a squabbling blanket of black feathers and snapping beaks. Even through the mass of scavengers, though, James could see the closest victim was wearing a bright-yellow chest piece and crimson pants. Another wore a fluorescent-pink shirt under her leather vest, and James felt something cold go down his spine. Even ripped and smeared with blood and dirt, there was no mistaking the tragically mismatched armor that only mid-level players wore.

  “Um, Fangs?” he said nervously. “Did you really mean what you said about being happy I was joining the clan?”

  “Of course,” Ar’Bati said with a cross look. “I would not have said it if it weren’t true.”

  “Good,” James said, cringing away from the mob that was eyeing him with naked hatred. “Because I don’t think they’re angry about the gnolls.”

  ****

  When the wind caravan finally rolled to a stop, Ar’Bati hopped down with a confident leap. James followed more discreetly, sticking to the warrior’s shadow as the two of them closed the final distance toward Windy Lake.

  Despite their clenched weapons and lashing tails, the mob of jubatus villagers didn’t hiss or jeer at them. They just watched, their mouths locked tight in angry, bloody silence. The gnolls clearly felt it, too, because they fell quiet as well, sticking to their wagons and keeping their hands on their weapons. This whole thing was already going much, much worse than James had envisioned, and since all the villagers were glaring at him, he was pretty sure why.

  When they were less than fifty feet from the wall of angry cat-people, Ar’Bati held up his fist. James scrabbled to a stop, staying as close to the warrior as possib
le without literally hiding behind him. He was trying to figure out how to ask why they’d stopped without anyone hearing when the stooped form of Elder Gray Fang emerged from the crowd, her staff crunching on the hard-packed road as she walked out to face them.

  “Ar’Bati,” she said in a steely voice. “What is the meaning of this?”

  She fixed the head warrior with a hard glare, but James had to give Fangs points for unlimited guts, because he flashed her a cocky grin in return. “We have returned victorious!” the warrior announced, raising his voice so everyone could hear. “The lich is destroyed, and the undead forces beneath the Red Canyon are vanquished! We have driven their evil from the savanna!”

  He lifted his new magical sword high as he finished, striking a victorious pose. But while he was clearly shooting for wild applause, the crowd remained as angrily silent as ever.

  “You did save Lilac,” Gray Fang admitted grudgingly. “Though it was as close as these things can get. Still, you completed your mission and upheld the honor of our village. Thank you, Ar’Bati.”

  She gave the warrior a bow so tiny, James almost missed it. When she looked up again, though, her face was harder and angrier than ever. “Now,” she growled. “What have you brought to our doorstep? Why do you travel with these gnolls?”

  She said gnolls the same way someone else would say dead skunk, and the hyena-men in the wagons behind them began to growl. James swallowed, too. He was dying to explain that this was a peace mission, but the baleful glares from the crowd made it clear that anything he tried to say would only make the situation worse. So he kept his hands on his staff and his mouth shut, mentally crossing his fingers as Ar’Bati opened his mouth.

  “We—”

  Whatever explanation he’d been about to give was cut off by a sudden burst of yipping, and James looked back to see Thunder Paw making his way up to the road to join them. The one-eyed Naturalist was flanked by several warriors, which caused several armed jubatus to rush out from the crowd and take up position around Gray Fang. But despite the score of tall warriors that were now looking down their daggers at him, the old gnoll continued his approach, walking slowly and deliberately until he was standing beside Ar’Bati and James.