The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  James cast a nervous look at the scowling nobles—especially his adoptive father, who looked angry enough to hork up a hairball—but there was nothing he could do. Tina was already marching them out of the lodge, firmly ignoring the glares digging like daggers into her back.

  Chapter 2

  James

  Twenty minutes earlier.

  “Are you serious?”

  James was in the Portal Keeper’s yurt. In the far corner, the other portal mages were clumped together in a terrified, angry, purple-robed knot, but he wasn’t even looking their direction. His eyes were locked on Leylia, holding her in place while the rest of his brain spun.

  “Serious as a heart attack,” Leylia said in her New York accent, sitting cross-legged on the wood-and-hide cot the jubatus had supplied. “Everything I just told you is legit, and I can prove it. I’ve got more, too, but I’m not giving out additional deets for free.” She glanced at her fellow Portal Keepers, who were watching her with expressions of terrified hate. “As you can see, this information doesn’t make me very popular with the locals. I’m happy to answer all your questions, but only if I get full player protection.”

  “I’m sure Tina would be fine offering you protection in exchange for this,” James promised. “But she needs to hear it with her own ears first.”

  His sister was going to flip. This could change everything, but he had to do it right. Information like this could tear the world apart if handled incorrectly.

  “Keep me from getting knifed, and I’ll talk to whoever you want,” Leylia promised.

  James nodded and turned to his brother, but that idea died as soon as he saw Ar’Bati’s face. Like the Portal Keepers, Fangs in Grass was radiating wrath like summer heat. It was clear he was fighting not to attack Leylia right then and there, which made him a very bad choice for guard duty. James had to get Tina himself, though. There was no way he was trusting something this sensitive to a messenger. The only way to get Tina here without letting the secret out was to fetch her himself, but he couldn’t take Leylia with him. That left only one option.

  “SilentBlayde?”

  The elven Assassin didn’t even look up. He was still sitting on the stool he’d flopped down on when they’d come in. His armor and body were filthy from the blood and ash of yesterday’s battles, and there were dark circles under his eyes from a night of no sleep and general emotional trauma. He didn’t look qualified to sit up straight, much less to protect what could be the most important source of information alive, but there was no one else.

  “SB?” James said again.

  The Assassin’s blue eyes grudgingly flicked his direction.

  “I’m going to get Tina so Leylia can tell her what she just told us,” James explained. “I need you to protect her until I get back.”

  He wasn’t sure his friend was parsing all of that, but SB gave him the slimmest of nods.

  “If it will help Tina, I will keep this woman alive until you return,” the elf said, shooting a look at the two male Portal Keepers that sent them scrambling even farther into the corner.

  James didn’t like the look on his friend’s face one bit, but it got him what he needed right now, so he rolled with it. “Thanks, dude. I’m counting on you,” he said, turning back to Leylia. “I’ll bring my sister here, but I’ll make it clear before she arrives that you’ll only talk if one of the guilds guarantees your safety. That’s the best I can do. Is it good enough?”

  “It’ll have to be,” Leylia said, but her brown eyes were worried. “Are you sure your friend’s okay?”

  SB was nowhere near okay, but James trusted him to do this job at least. Maybe nothing else, but if there was one thing his friend was good at right now, it was looking scary.

  “He’ll be fine,” he assured her. “You’ll be fine. Just sit there. I’ll be right back.”

  Grabbing the angrily vibrating Ar’Bati, James pulled them out the flap into the blazing heat of the noonday Savanna. The knight guarding the yurt was red faced and drenched in sweat, reminding James to be glad he was a jubatus and naturally adapted to this specific climate. He needed all the advantages he could get right now. But when he started down the street toward the player area, Ar’Bati dug his claws into the dirt.

  “I can’t be involved in this.”

  James sighed. “Fangs…”

  “I want to skin her alive,” his brother snarled. “I know I should be better, but eighty years of hatred don’t just go away!”

  “I know, but—”

  “I can’t be trusted around her,” Fangs said angrily. “So I will take my mother’s advice for once and remove myself from the situation. Come find me when you are no longer dealing with that woman.”

  With that, the tall cat-warrior turned on his heel and stalked away. James didn’t bother chasing after him. As much as he wanted his adoptive brother’s support, this was probably for the best. Honestly, he thought Fangs was handling it pretty well all things considered, but his reaction was a good reminder that Leylia’s fears were not just paranoia. If the secret she’d told them got out to the general population of this world, James didn’t think they’d all be as self-controlled as Ar’Bati. The quicker he got her under Tina’s protection, the better their chances of going home, so he turned away from his brother’s retreating back and started toward the center of town. A few feet later, he dropped to all fours, the Eclipsed Steel staff banging against his tail as he loped through the busy streets toward the player area.

  Which turned out to be a total waste of time. Normally his sister’s giant stonekin was easy to find, but he didn’t see her at all in the chaos of the players’ camp. He was frantically checking the tents when the Roughnecks’ other tank—a man he’d known in game as DarkKnight but was apparently going by Frank these days—told him Roxxy had gone to a war meeting.

  James didn’t need more than that. There was only one place in Windy Lake where important meetings happened, so he turned right back around and ran at full speed toward the Naturalist Lodge. Sure enough, the front stairs were covered in guards and various anxious-looking assistants. One of them tried to stop him, but James blew right past, sprinting through the curtain into the tensest atmosphere of his life.

  He froze the moment he got inside. He had no idea what was going on, but the whole room was staring at Tina as if she’d just threatened to burn down the village. She looked mad enough to do it, too, which was never good. For once, though, her mood seemed to improve when she spotted him.

  “James,” Gregory said in a voice that sounded both worried and relieved. “What are you doing here? Is something wrong?”

  He was so off kilter from the sudden blasting attention that the gentle question made him flinch. Fortunately, Tina was still smiling at him, so James decided to ignore the kicked hornet’s nest he’d apparently just stepped into and focus on the mission.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, Your Majesty,” he said, addressing Gregory because that was what you did when there was a king in the room. “But I have something I must speak to my sister about immediately. I realize this is a bad time—”

  “On the contrary,” his sister said, grabbing his shoulder so hard James staggered. “It’s a great time. Let’s go.”

  He really should have said more. He’d come here for Tina, but just walking out while everyone was staring felt unspeakably rude, especially with Gregory looking so desperate. There was nothing James could do, though. His sister’s hand was as heavy as the boulder it resembled. It would have been easier to fight a rockslide than to keep her from marching him out of the tent, and honestly, he didn’t really want to. Their exit had been much more flagrant than he’d intended, but he couldn’t fault Tina for wanting to get out of that antagonistic atmosphere.

  “Killer timing, bro,” she said in a relieved voice, confirming his suspicions. “What’s the fire?”

  “It’s not a fire so much as a game changer,” James told her excitedly, rising up on his toes and dropping his voice to a w
hisper. “I’ve been talking to the Portal Keepers all morning. Specifically, I’ve been talking to Leylia.”

  “Whoa,” Tina said, her gemstone eyes going wide. “When you say ‘Leylia,’ do you mean the Leylia? As in ‘Leylia’s Disease’?”

  He nodded rapidly. “This is big, T, but I don’t want to say more here.” He turned and looked pointedly at the crowd of guards and assistants hovering around the tent they’d just left. “If you’d just—”

  “Way ahead of you,” she said, keeping her own voice to a gravelly whisper. “But if we’re talking about what I think we are, then the others will want to hear it, too. Let me get Cinco and Assets, and we’ll go.”

  James stared, dumbstruck, as his sister—without argument, without demands, without further cajoling—stepped back into the lodge to fetch the other players. She reemerged a minute later with her fellow guild leaders, both of whom looked equal parts angry and curious.

  “Okay,” CincoDeMurder said when he spotted James. “You met the actual Leylia? As in the crazy lady who—”

  “Yes,” James said frantically, cutting the Berserker off before he could blurt out “the crazy lady who made FFO” in the middle of the crowded steps packed full of guards and officials. “And you’re going to want to hear what she has to say.”

  “Must we?” Assets sighed, giving Tina a put-out look. “I can’t imagine it’s more important than—”

  “If James says it’s important, it’s important,” Tina said, glaring at the elf like she was daring him to argue. Assets, being smart, did not, and Tina turned back to her brother. “Lead the way.”

  Her trust was enough to make James actually tear up a bit. He turned quickly to hide it, motioning for the other players to follow him back through the village toward the Portal Keepers’ tent. “Before we talk to her, there’s something I need to ask you,” he said as they walked. “Leylia’s information has the potential to make a lot of people very, very angry. She’s afraid for her life, and from what she’s told me already, I think she has good reason. She’s willing to tell us everything, but only if we agree to protect her once it’s out.”

  “I take it you mean protecting her from the NPCs,” Cinco said, scratching the stubble on his square jaw. “Shouldn’t be hard, but what’s she got that’s so bad?”

  James looked around nervously. Fortunately, all of the jubatus on the road were giving the players a wide berth, so he decided to take a risk. “Leylia caused the Nightmare.”

  “Holy shit,” Tina said.

  “How?” Cinco asked at the same time.

  “She said it was an accident,” James whispered. “That’s all I can tell you right now, but do you get why she’s afraid? Every person in this village suffered horribly during the Nightmare. Imagine what they’d do to her if they knew she was the reason.”

  “I don’t have to imagine,” Tina said. “I’ve already seen what they were willing to do to us, and we didn’t even know what the hell was going on.” She looked down at James. “Do you think she can tell us how to get home?”

  “She hinted at it,” James said. “But she wouldn’t say anything definitive without a promise of protection. I think she knows, though. At the very least, she can tell us how we got here. If we know that, maybe we can figure out how to get back.”

  “Good enough for me,” Tina said.

  “Me too,” Cinco said, hooking his thumbs into the band of his ridiculously oversized metal belt. “Red Sands will do it. If any NPCs get within ten feet of her, we’ll turn them into stains on the grass. Assuming her info is good, of course.”

  The casual violence of that statement was enough to make James’s ears go flat. This was what he’d wanted, though, so he just nodded and resumed walking, leading the other players through the mess that was Bastion’s refugee camp to the larger, guarded tent that had been erected for the Portal Keepers.

  Sir Jamie opened the flap the moment they got close, and James darted into the tent’s cool, dark interior. He sighed in relief when he spotted Leylia right where he’d left her, sitting on her cot under SB’s watchful eye. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize the rest of what he’d done until Tina pushed into the tent behind him and froze.

  All at once, it was so silent he could hear his own blood in his ears. Next to him, SilentBlayde rose from his stool, his eyes locked on Tina like they were stuck there. For her part, Tina was as still as the stone that made her. She didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  “Tina…” SB began. “I—”

  “Whatever,” Tina said gruffly, turning away.

  The look of hurt on SilentBlayde’s face was so sharp even his mask couldn’t hide it. He didn’t say anything, though. Just quietly stepped back into the shadows as Tina focused all of her attention toward the brown-haired woman on the cot.

  “Are you Leylia?”

  “That’s me,” Leylia said, glancing nervously from James to Tina and back again. “Did James tell you my thing?”

  “He did,” Tina said, turning her body so that her back was to SB even though they were standing almost side by side in the yurt. “CincoDeMurder has volunteered his people to guard you. They’ll keep you safe.”

  “We’ll keep you better than safe,” Cinco said, stepping up beside Tina and reaching way up to rest an arm on her shoulder. “What Tina here is forgetting to mention is that Red Sands was the best PvP guild in FFO. My guys are stone-cold killers. If some stupid NPC wants to polish their grudge, we’ll polish the ground with his face.”

  “Gruesome, but good to know,” Leylia said with a smile. “I feel better already.”

  “That said,” Cinco went on. “You’ve gotta know you’re still screwed in the long run. We’ve got you covered here, but Red Sands can’t protect you for the rest of your life.”

  “That’s fine,” Leylia said. “I just need someone to watch my back until I can give the king the slip. I know this world better than anyone, and vanishing into the crowd is easy in a place with no internet or cameras. I’ve just gotta survive the next couple weeks, and I should be golden.”

  “Works for us,” Tina said, crossing her arms. “We’ve satisfied our part of your bargain. Now talk.”

  “Okay, okay,” Leylia said, and then she held out her hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Leylia Reis, and yeah, I’m the Leylia.”

  Now that she was actually talking, James couldn’t stop himself. “How’d you create the Nightmare?” he blurted.

  Leylia winced. “I didn’t set out to create it. I mean, what happened was totally my fault, but it wasn’t intentional.”

  From the corner of the tent, one of the other two Portal Keepers made an angry sound, and James flinched. The last time she’d admitted her role, the two men had flown into a rage, forcing him to restrain them. They looked like they were about to try again, but they made it no more than a step before Tina’s giant stone trunk of an arm stopped them.

  “How did it happen?” Tina asked, completely ignoring the two NPC mages, who were already cowering back down. “Accident or not, knowing how this started could help us end it.”

  Leylia sighed. “I’m sure you all know all about Leylia’s Disease, that whole can-never-wake-up lucid-dreaming problem?” When everyone nodded, she went on. “Well, the reason it’s named after me is because I’ve had that problem my whole life. Like, before there was an FFO or even the VR Sensorium Engine. Everyone thought I was just crazy, and I thought so too at the time, but I know now it wasn’t a mental disease. I was seeing all those things because I’m a natural-born Portal Keeper.”

  “What does that mean?” Assets asked, wiggling his way between the other, much-taller players.

  “It means I have the ability to read the Infinite Unbounded Sky and connect magically to other worlds contained within it.”

  “That’s stupid,” Cinco said. “Our world doesn’t have magic.”

  “Au contraire, Mr. Hunky Muscles,” Leylia said, wagging her finger at him. “As its name suggests, the Infinite Sky is infinite. We’r
e all part of it. Our home universe just happens to be in a very dark, very cold, very low-magic segment. That lowness makes natural Portal Keepers like me a one-in-a-lots-of-billions chance, but it does happen on occasion. Anyway, we didn’t know any of this at the time, but my parents were loaded and determined that their only daughter wasn’t going to spend her life in an asylum. That’s why, when my therapist suggested embracing my visions as a way of learning to deal with them, they let me spend waaaayy too much money building a fully immersive VR version of the world I saw in my dreams. When I did, and the tab got too high, we decided to turn the world I’d built into a VR game to try to recoup some of the losses. And thus FFO was born!”

  “Didn’t that bother you?” James asked. “I mean, therapy is supposed to be private.”

  “Not at all,” Leylia said, shaking her head. “Remember, I wasn’t actually crazy. I built the digital version of this world based on the visions I saw of an actual place. It was always meant to have people, and FFO-the-game was a lot more fun than FFO-the-therapy-program. Also, I got to go down in history as the founder of the first full-immersion VR MMO RPG as opposed to a footnote in some psych journal, so there’s that.”

  “I thought people with Leylia’s were supposed to avoid playing FFO,” Tina said. “Doesn’t the game make your condition worse, not better?”

  “Oh yeah, it was an epic failure as therapy,” Leylia said. “And it gets worse. I didn’t know it at the time, but as we were building the world that eventually became FFO, my Portal Keeper powers were slowly connecting the fake copy-world I was making with the real one. That would have been bad enough by itself, but the real kick came when we started letting other people in. All of a sudden, millions of players were walking around in the version of this world I’d painstakingly reproduced and treating it as real. Their participation reinforced my belief and made my waking dreams even more vivid. Eventually, the feedback loop got so strong, I couldn’t tell which world was real anymore. The only time I felt normal was when I was playing FFO, and the more I played, the stronger my powers became until, a few weeks after the game’s launch, we crossed the ten million–player threshold, and the Nightmare began.”