Cronica Acadia

by C. J. Deering

  “Then time travel would be possible between the worlds if you could map these changes.”

  “What a great mind you have already. I am glad I did not wait longer for our reunion.”

  “Who are those she-trolls?”

  “My minions,” said Regicide. “Porsche and Mercedes. Their true names are impossible to pronounce without a forked tongue and nearly impossible with one. So I named them after a couple of strippers I knew in the other world. Though to be honest, those strippers were much crueler than my she-trolls.”

  “Master, why do you insult us?” asked Mercedes. Or Porsche. It was impossible to tell.

  “Why are you with trolls?” said Dangalf. “You’re human.” Mercedes and Porsche sneered at him.

  “About that,” said Regicide as he removed his helm. “There was a little accident.” His head was a pattern of mismatched and ragged skin held together with dark stitches. Dangalf was horrified but understood that Regicide was now a lich.

  “Undead!” said Dangalf, remembering Dymphna’s prophecy. “You were the one who summoned us here!”

  “I did.”

  “How? How did you even get here?”

  “I willed myself here. I knew that Cronica was more than a game, and so I immersed myself in it. I would dream about it at night. And I began seeing this world, and I found a great she-troll necromancer who was seeing our world. Our minds found each other, and we communed. It was she who brought me to this world.”

  “You were the human captain who sacrificed himself to Gykoja! Our friend lost his arm because of your scheming.”

  “The lucky ones lost limbs. The unfortunate ones died. And the most unfortunate were raised up again to serve. But we won’t go into that now. Suffice to say it was for the grandest of reasons: my deification.” Regicide went to one of the wyverns and removed a book from a saddlebag. He returned to Dangalf, eager to share with another who would appreciate the ancient tome. “It is a burden that I can not carry my library around in my head as you do,” said Regicide.

  “Cronica Oceania,” said Dangalf, releasing his crotch to take the book. “You have it.”

  “Oceania is rediscovered. A primordial land that holds the very pool of life itself. An ancient ceremony performed at that site will restore life to me. And it will be a life that can never again be confined to the grave. I’m sorry to say that you will be part of that transformation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The ceremony requires human blood. Unfortunately, I did not realize that the human blood rune of this world would be the mirror image of my own and would not work for the ceremony. Before I displaced Gykoja, I was able to have her summon your group to this world. I knew if your group came here, there would be at least two humans who would match the pattern of my own bloodrune.” Regicide took back the Cronica Oceania and returned it to his saddlebags. One of the she-trolls retrieved an obviously goblin device of hoses and jars and metal teeth from another wyvern. “There is so much more I would like to share with you, but these guards will be missed at some point. So now I must take your blood.”

  “My blood? How much of my blood?”

  “All of it. The ceremony is uncompromising. And you would become a most formidable foe if left alive.” Regicide was cold and final. The she-troll with the goblin blood-remover approached. Dangalf thought about attack, but the creatures were far greater at combat than he and outnumbered him. It was a fight-or-flight situation, and fight was not an option. “But first, we must remove your ward,” said Regicide. “It was foreseen that you would be warded against physical harm.”

  “I’ve been warded against physical harm?”

  “It was also foreseen that you would be unaware of that warding.” And instantly the other she-troll was roughly upon Dangalf and in his pocket. With a supreme look of terror, she withdrew her hand, but not before Dusty howled at her and gashed deeply into her hand. She backed up terror stricken and unappeared.

  Dusty leapt from Dangalf’s pocket and charged at the other she-troll. “A cat!” screamed the other she-troll in her black tongue. She dropped the goblin device and unappeared herself. They escaped without even footprints in the snow.

  Regicide stood there somewhat chagrined by the retreat of his fearsome she-trolls. “You might have known that trolls have an irrational fear of housecats,” Regicide said. “But then that still wouldn’t explain why you carry one around in your pocket.” Dusty stood in front of Dangalf, howling and hissing at Regicide. “Come back, girls,” commanded Regicide. “I will slay the kitty for you.” Regicide drew a sword and took a step toward Dusty.

  “Hurry, Dusty!” Dangalf shouted, and Dusty ran back to him and leapt into the pocket he held open for her. Dangalf ran to the edge of the mountain and jumped. The two she-trolls reappeared by Regicide as he stepped onto Dangalf’s last footprints. They watched Dangalf fall and disappear into the mist, his last words echoing back up the cliff.

  “He has death cursed us!” said a she-troll.

  “Fool, I told you he is an elementalist,” said the other. “What did he say, Master?”

  Regicide paused over the confounding words. Words in the old tongue, from the other world, the other universe. A language rarely spoken in this world and in a phrase never before uttered here: Goodbye, Mr. Chips!

  LXXXVIII

  Doppelganger was next to enter the room, and he was in no condition to notice the subtle erasure of Dangalf’s sacking and removal. As he relit lamps and the fireplace, he was stoking his own warrior fire with beer. The dwarves at the Red School had all taken turns bashing and mocking Doppelganger, and as his frustration had grown, his skills seemed to fail him.

  Yes, they were soldiers and warriors, and they were supposed to be superior to his mercenary rank, but his pride would not let go of his repeated failures. And how dare they add insult to injury by mocking him!

  The warrior trainer cursed out Doppelganger when he couldn’t summon his bloodwarp. It was as fundamental as unappear to the blackguard and metamorphism to the druid, and like those it had to be summoned on command. It had only been coaxed out of him before and then only when his own blood stained the ground. To summon it after he was wounded might be too late. The trainer told him what he already knew: he would not become a soldier until he could summon the bloodwarp on command. And the fact that he could not yet do so meant that he might never make warrior, let alone become a dragoon.

  Filthy little bastards, thought Doppelganger as he drank. Short, gold digging, farting and belching, hair-braiding, beard soup-making foreigners. And he fell onto his bed and kept drinking.

  Ashlyn entered the room unfortunately too late to interrupt Doppelganger getting drunk but too soon for him to be passed out. She closed the door but rested her back against it rather than enter further. Something was wrong about the room, but the minutiae of the wrongness was overpowered by the drunken angry warrior dominating the room. “You and Dangalf didn’t come to the tavern.”

  “Come here!” he barked to her from his bed.

  That was a new! She had never before been commanded so roughly. She sauntered over to his bed but remained standing.

  “Sit down.” She sat on the bed next to him. “Drink.” He handed her his bottle but she hesitated.

  “Why don’t we go to the tavern?”

  “Because if I never see another stinking dwarf it will be too soon!”

  “Wow,” said Ashlyn. “I’ve thought that to myself so many times. And now that I hear someone else say it, it just sounds so…ignorant.”

  Doppelganger sat up angrily. “Are you saying I’m ignorant?”

  “No. But you’re losing yourself.”

  “What?”

  “Well, we’ve all changed. I mean, look at this,” said Ashlyn with a hand flourish across her body. “But we’ve all kept our basic personalities. We’re ourselves first and our classes second. But you, it’s different. Your personality, the person I knew at least and the person Dangalf remembers, has been subli
mated. You’re a mercenary first and Doppel second.”

  “You bitch.” Doppelganger pulled the bottle away from her and finished it. “You tell me I have lost myself to the warrior, and the dwarves tell me I’ll never be a warrior.” Doppelganger lifted the bottle to his mouth and finding it still empty, threw it crashing against the stone wall so he wouldn’t make that mistake again. He looked Ashlyn up and down. “Why do she-elves dress like that?”

  “Because we can.”

  Doppelganger sat up and grabbed one of her wrists in his iron grip. He was terrifyingly fast for a big, drunk mercenary. She remembered her training and bent like the reed into him, and his grip naturally loosened. But he did not release. “Don’t you know there are consequences for dressing like that?”

  “You should definitely be thinking of consequences right now.”

  Doppelganger pulled her close to him and kissed her pale belly. He looked up for her reaction, and she looked down at him dispassionately. He responded to this by tearing open the front of her top. And then she was a tyger and slipped out of his grip. She strode to the other side of the room, where she transformed back to elf. Doppelganger laid back down on the bed, momentarily defeated. She tried to close her top, her back turned to him. “You ripped it,” she said sadly.

  “So what?”

  “I don’t have many nice things.”

  “You sound like a woman,” he laughed. “Buy another!” And he threw a coin purse from the nightstand at her, but it fell short of its destination as the coins dispersed across the room.

  “Why did you change back?” he demanded.

  “I can’t talk to you while I’m morphed.”

  “What would you like to talk about?”

  She sat in a chair, still on the far side of the room. “I just want to see how this plays out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want to see if this marks the end of the Keepers.”

  Nerdraaage entered boisterously and drunkenly, but he was not so drunk that he couldn’t discern that a great crime had occurred. “Hey! Who threw my coin purse on the floor!” He sat on the floor and hummed a song as he placed the coins back into his purse.

  “Stinking dwarves,” snarled Doppelganger.

  “What?” said Nerdraaage.

  “You should probably leave,” said Ashlyn to the dwarf.

  “They have years more training than I have, but they mock me for not being as good as them! I’m twice the warrior any of them were at my level! The blue race doubts my Red School talent! Humans invented the Red School!”

  “Or at least unappear,” continued Ashlyn’s warning.

  “What?” said Nerdraaage turning in confusion between Doppelganger and Ashlyn.

  Doppelganger stood menacingly. “Watch this!” First Doppelganger turned the color of his school. And then he began shaking, and black veins appeared all over his body, pumping the powerful humors to every inch of muscle, bone, and brain. Bones creaked and clothes strained as he became taller and wider. Muscles bulged as if to test the very elasticity of his skin. Brow and cheeks pushed forward. His nostrils flared with a great snort. His jaw unhinged and formed a large, ferocious mouth. His pupils dilated until his eyes appeared black. He cried out.

  Doppelganger took two steps toward Nerdraaage and kicked him from the floor into the wall behind him. If Nerdraaage wasn’t so drunk and a dwarf, he might have been hurt. “Son of a…” said Nerdraaage as he picked himself up off the floor. He couldn’t finish his curse before Doppelganger was on him again, but the sturdy dwarf wrapped himself around Doppelganger’s legs. This was of dubious advantage since it allowed Doppelganger to rain blows down on Nerdraaage’s head, and he opened up bloody gashes there. The sight of blood fed Doppelganger’s bloodwarp.

  But the blood stopped as new pink skin grew over the wounds. The druid was healing him. He tossed Nerdraaage aside and charged at Ashlyn. She morphed into tyger and leapt out of the way. Doppelganger charged toward her again, but Nerdraaage intercepted him. He pounded his stone fists into Doppelganger’s gut, but Doppelganger didn’t feel anything. He kicked and punched the dwarf brutally.

  “Nerdraaage!” said Ashlyn angrily. “You’re a blackguard!” It took a split second, but Nerdraaage remembered that he was in fact a blackguard, and he unappeared.

  Doppelganger spun around looking for his unappeared opponent. He kicked and swung at the air, but he couldn’t find him. Then he took a chair to increase his wingspan and swung around the room in an attempt to strike his invisible opponent. Then he saw Ashlyn standing in the corner of the room and changed targets. He kept his arms spread wide as he approached her. She would not escape him again even in tyger form.

  But Ashlyn didn’t have the electroplasm to morph anymore. She had expended it all with her first morph and the healing of Nerdraaage. She was after all a very new druid, and there was no natural magic to draw upon in the stone room. So she stood defenseless, knowing that the blows that had so injured the tough dwarf would tear her flesh and crush her bones. There was only her kraken-tooth dagger on her thigh. But she would not. She could not.

  And just as he approached her, Nerdraaage reappeared behind Doppelganger and placed a dagger into his back. “Say hello to my little—” Nerdraaage was in the process of a quote that he had often employed in the game when Doppelganger knocked him furiously back against the wall.

  “You backstabbing coward!” cried Doppelganger. “You want to use weapons? I have weapons!” Doppelganger retrieved his axe and marched toward Nerdraaage still on the floor where he had been knocked. Doppelganger raised the axe above the wounded dwarf before he suddenly collapsed to the floor with a crash that must have been heard in the room below even through the stone floor. Ashlyn ran to Doppelganger.

  “Oh my gods!” she said. “I hope you didn’t kill him!”

  “Nah,” said Nerdraaage. “But I should have.”

  Doppelganger stared at Ashlyn weakly as his bloodwarp subsided. He looked as though he wished he could apologize but maybe she was just projecting. She turned him as much as she could to look at his back wound. She had generated a little bit of electroplasm and healed his back. “Hey!” yelled Nerdraaage. “What about me!” Ashlyn went to the dwarf. She kneeled next to him and examined him. She spoke the magic words and cast heals upon him as she felt her electroplasm welling inside of her. “He kicked my ass,” said Nerdraaage.

  “No,” said Ashlyn. “It wasn’t a fair fight. He was taken by the bloodwarp, and you didn’t want to hurt your friend.”

  Nerdraaage tried to find the insult in her words but couldn’t. “What do we do with him?”

  “Let him sleep,” said Ashlyn. And then suddenly, “Where’s Dangalf?”

  LXXXIX

  Ashlyn stood in the guard command post before the sergeant of the guard, the ranking guard in the keep at this hour. “My friend is missing. He’s a human conjurer. Dangalf of Hempshire.”

  “I have my own problems, she-elf. I’m missing a patrol.”

  “Can you at least let the guards know to be on the lookout for him?”

  “Write down his description. I’ll pass it along. Still it will be twenty-four hours before all the patrols and posts get the message.”

  “Why twenty-four hours?”

  “It will take that long before they all cycle back through the keep for briefing.”

  “Can’t you send pigeons to them?”

  “Pigeons? To each patrol and post for a misplaced human?”

  Nerdraaage entered, just hearing the last of the conversation. This dwarf was not of his clan. Stonefist alone had responsibility for royal protection, but the keep guards were of many clans. Nerdraaage knew none of these clans was as prominent as his own when he said plainly to the sergeant, “Send out the birds.” And they were sent.

  XC

  Regicide had failed. He and the she-trolls searched for Dangalf until dwarven griffin riders chased them away from the keep. Even with his assassin molls, he was not ready to take o
n an army of Bran Keep defenders. Not yet anyway.

  Dangalf’s escape was only the second failure of his otherwise brilliantly executed plan. (The first was the unforeseen difference of human bloodrunes between the two universes—the bloodrune bend sinister.) But Dangalf’s escape was especially troubling. Dangalf just happened to be carrying a cat in his pocket, perhaps the one creature in this world that would terrorize the she-trolls. And then that Dangalf should be wearing a flying cloak to make his airborne escape from the mountain! Flying cloaks were impossibly expensive, and even then there was a years-long waiting list to purchase one. It was a great prize that one would not expect to be in the possession of so humble a conjurer.

  Now Dangalf knew that Regicide was here and that he needed his blood. He would tell Doppelganger, the other candidate blood donor, and they would be prepared. Regicide tried to banish his doubts. This was his world after all. He had a twenty-year advantage over his former friends.

  Regicide knew from an early age that he had been born in the wrong world. He had diagnosed himself as a sociopath, and that had been independently confirmed by several of his ex-girlfriends. He didn’t push old ladies downstairs—he might even hold open a door for them—but his displays of kindness and gentleness were ruses. He had no problem with violence, but he considered unfocused violence to be a distraction. Those practitioners ended up in jail or asylums, and he wanted to rule the world. The problem was how? There were no summer camps for would-be world conquerors as there were for gifted athletes or musicians or computer geeks. Politics bored him. The leader of the most powerful nation had to shun, for the most part, all of the most enticing aspects of power and privilege. Only a few petty dictators in the desert or in the jungle had the kind of power he wanted to wield. And they were merely smoldering cigarette butts waiting for the monolith of civilized society to extend a foot and snuff them out.

  Then one day Regicide passed a decrepit bookstore that had suddenly appeared overnight. Now in this bluest of worlds, he was not unaccustomed to a new building popping up overnight, but an old decrepit one popping up overnight bore further investigation. “Used Books” the signage read without any further ado. Seldom before had he entered a bookstore (all the combined wisdom of the world was online, was it not?), and he had never before entered a used bookstore, but something drew him to this place. He wondered how many times before he had passed without realizing a bookstore even existed in this too-small spot between the Laundromat and the Mexican restaurant.