Something was crushing my chest.
I woke up fighting it. I shoved with both hands and the weight didn't move, because the weight was my own arm. It lay across my ribs like a fallen log, enormous, with an old white scar across the forearm and a ring on the third finger set with a black stone.
I did not own a ring. I did not own that arm.
I lay very still and looked at the ceiling. There wasn't one. There was a black canopy with black tassels, hung from four black posts. The sheets were black too, and they smelled of cold ash and cedar.
My last memory was the save screen at two in the morning. A takeout box was going cold on the carpet, and the cartridge was warm in the console I'd dug out of my closet after the layoff email. Fifteen years as a marketing consultant, the last six of them making frozen fish sound like a lifestyle, and it had ended in two lines on a Thursday morning. A man who has just been told his position has been eliminated is allowed to play a video game from 1994.
I sat up, and the arm came with me. So did a chest I'd never seen before, wide and hard and crossed with more white scars. My stomach was flat. My stomach had not been flat since my thirties.
"Okay," I said.
The voice that came out was not mine. It was low and rough and very large. It sounded like a cellar door opening onto something you shouldn't go down to look at.
"Okay," I said again, quieter. It didn't help.
I got to the window on legs that were too long and too sure of themselves. Outside, a gorge fell away so far that the bottom was only fog, grey as old dishwater. Wind came up out of it and carried flakes of ash past the glass. On the far side, moorland ran north under a low sky. There were no streetlights and no roads that I could see.
There was a mirror on the wall beside the window. I looked into it because I had to.
A man of forty or so looked back. Short black hair, with a single streak of white running back from the left temple. Pale grey eyes, almost colorless, in a long hard face. And a scar that started at the corner of the mouth and ran down to the hinge of the jaw, as if someone had once tried to make him smile wider.
I knew that face from a sixteen-bit portrait in the corner of a dialogue box. I had looked at it every Saturday of my childhood, in a rental copy of The Crown of Velmora I'd borrowed so often that the box art wore white at the corners.
"Vaskar Thorne," I said to the mirror.
The mirror said it back, in that voice.
"Oh, no." I put both hands on the cold stone of the sill. "No, no. Buddy. I was rooting for you."
The Dread Lord of the Ashmarch, the villain, the man who burned the hero's village in Act One, took the Crown, and died in his own throne room at the end of Act Three with a glowing sword through his chest. Every time I played, I'd wanted him to win. I'd wanted to know what he was thinking. I'd wanted, God help me, a sequel from his side.
Somebody up there had read my letter to Santa very literally.
Two notes chimed, soft and close, like a doorbell in a nice apartment.
A window opened in the air in front of me. It wasn't in the wall. It was a rectangle of flat blue light with a thin white border, hanging at reading distance, and the letters on it were crisp and white in the blocky font of the game's menus. I'd have known it anywhere.
```status VASKAR THORNE — Level 34 — Dread Lord Health 920 | Mana 242 Strength 60 | Vitality 58 | Agility 30 | Magic 62 | Spirit 28 | Luck 20 Infamy 2,400 (Feared) | Suspicion 0 | Off-script 0% Soul: — (vacant) ```
I read it the way I used to read a quarterly report. Top to bottom, slowly, looking for the number that would get me fired.
Level thirty-four. The Dread Lord was the boss at the end of the game, and he'd been a lot higher than that when I fought him, so this was early. The numbers under it were big, bigger than any starting hero's. Infamy, Suspicion and Off-script I didn't recognize at all. The original game never had those.
The last line I read three times.
Soul, it said. Then a dash. Then the word vacant.
The dash sat there in the blue light like an empty parking space.
I sat down on the floor. I didn't decide to. My legs decided and I went along. The stone was cold through whatever I was wearing, which was a black linen shirt and nothing else of note.
I breathed the way the HR lady had taught us in the resilience seminar. In for four, hold for four, out for four. I'd thought it was nonsense at the time. It was still nonsense, but it gave my lungs something to do while my brain screamed.
Here was the honest truth, sitting on that floor. I was terrified. I was forty-one, recently unemployed, and dead or dreaming or something worse. I was also, somehow, in the most famous villain's body from the only game I had ever truly loved.
And here was the other truth, the one that got me up off the floor.
I knew this game. I knew every map, where the hidden chests were and which shopkeepers lied. I knew the script.
That had to be worth something.
Somebody knocked.
It wasn't a confident knock. It was three small taps, a pause, and a fourth tap that sounded like an apology.
"Come in," said the cellar door.
The man who came in kept his eyes on the floor the whole time. He was thin, sixty or so, in a long grey coat buttoned to the throat. He had a ledger under one arm and a pen behind one ear. He bowed so low that I worried about his back. He stayed down there, folded, waiting to be told he could unfold.
"You can stand up," I said.
He stood up, slowly, the way a man straightens when he's sure the order is a trap.
"My lord," he said to my feet. "Good morning, my lord. Pimm, my lord. Your steward. As ever."
I remembered him. Pimm. In the game he was a sprite who stood beside the throne and said "As my lord commands" in a text box. He had one line. He got killed in the siege off-screen.
He was shaking, though not a lot. There was a fine tremor in the hand that held the ledger.
"The morning report," Pimm said. "If it pleases you. If it doesn't, I can come back. Or not come back."
"It pleases me," I said. "Go ahead."
He blinked at my boots. I don't think the man in this body before me had ever said "go ahead" in his life.
Pimm read. The grain stores in the lower ward were down a tenth from last month. A horse dead in the east stable, cause unknown, possibly spite. A petition from a village called Slatecross about bandits on the moor road. Eleven barrels of moor tea arrived, three spoiled.
"And the Lord Commander," Pimm said, and his voice went very careful, "awaits your orders regarding Emberford, my lord."
There it was.
"Emberford," I said.
"The village across the Greyward, my lord. As discussed. As you discussed. With the Lord Commander. At length."
I'd discussed nothing. The man who'd discussed it was gone, and his soul slot said so.
"Remind me," I said. "What did we settle? The Lord Commander and I."
Pimm's pen hand stopped shaking for a second, then started again, harder. Nobody had ever asked him to remind the Dread Lord of anything.
"You wished it done at dusk, my lord," he said. "On the night of the bonfire, when the whole village is in the field. The Lord Commander wished it done at dawn, when they're asleep. You said dusk. You said you wanted them awake." He swallowed. "You said you wanted the healer's head on the gate by morning. As a message."
"A message to who?"
"To whom, my lord." He winced at himself. "Forgive me. To the Dawn, my lord. You said the Dawn should know who rules the north."
I thought about the woman in the cutscene with the basket of herbs. The old Vaskar had wanted her head on a gate. He'd said it to this terrified old man over breakfast, probably, between the grain report and the dead horse.
"Pimm," I said. "How long have you served here?"
"Thirty-one years, my lord. Under you and under your father."
"Do you like it?"
He looked up. For the first time, his eyes came off my boots and reached my face, and what was in them was pure, polished terror. He was trying to work out which answer would get him thrown into the gorge.
"I serve," he said.
"That's not what I asked." I heard how it sounded in this voice and tried to soften it. It didn't soften. This voice didn't have a soft setting. "Never mind. Not a test. Is there anything else I should know before I face the Lord Commander?"
Pimm opened his ledger and shut it again.
"A kitchen boy was whistling in the yard this morning, my lord," he said. "Within the mile. The law says ten lashes. The Lord Commander will expect it done."
"There's a law against whistling."
"Your law, my lord. You dislike whistling. You said it sounds like hope."
I looked at him. He looked at the floor again.
"Hold off on the lashes," I said. "I'll get to it."
"As my lord commands." He wrote something in the ledger with a pen that wobbled. I'd bet a month's salary it said the lord is unwell.
"Get me dressed," I said. "I'll see the Lord Commander in the throne room."
Getting dressed took three people.
Pimm called two servants, a man and a woman who kept their eyes on the floor exactly like Pimm. They brought armor, a full suit of black plate with every piece edged in dull iron. They bolted me into it one plate at a time.
The breastplate went on and my shoulders took the load. The pauldrons followed, and then the greaves. By the time they buckled the cloak on, I understood why the Dread Lord had been in a bad mood for three acts.
I took one step and the armor clanked. I took another, and learned that plate armor does not bend where your body expects it to bend. My knee asked for something and the armor said no.
"Stairs," Pimm said. "The north stair, as ever."
The north stair spiraled down around a stone column.
"How many steps?" I asked.
"One hundred and twelve," came Pimm's voice behind me.
"Has anyone ever fallen down them in this?"
"Your father, my lord. Once. At the end."
It was the longest staircase I have ever walked. Every step rang through the plate and into my teeth. Halfway down I put a gauntleted hand on the wall to steady myself and left a scrape in the stone. Behind me, Pimm made a small noise of grief.
At the bottom, a servant came around the corner with a tray. She saw me and jerked back. A silver goblet tipped off the tray and fell.
My hand caught it.
I didn't look. I didn't decide. My right arm went out and down and closed around the goblet's stem an inch above the floor, and not a drop spilled. Then my arm brought it back up and set it on her tray, gently, as though it had done that a thousand times.
Everyone froze, the servant and Pimm and me most of all.
I looked at the hand. It looked back, in its black steel, very calm.
The body remembers, I thought. I don't. But it does.
I reached up to push my glasses back on my nose. My fingers hit the cold edge of a steel gauntlet against a bare face. There were no glasses. There hadn't been glasses on this face, ever.
"Carry on," I told the servant, in the cellar-door voice.
She fled.
"Pimm," I said. "Was I always like that?"
"Quick, my lord?" He was staring at the goblet on the tray, far down the corridor now. "Yes. And always calm about it. That was the part we feared."
The throne room ran the length of a church. The walls were black basalt and the floor was black stone polished to a dull shine. Tall narrow windows let in grey light and ash. Two lines of soldiers stood along the walls in black half-plate with their spears grounded and their visors down, maybe a hundred of them. The Black Guard. In the game they were palette-swapped enemies you fought in the castle's lower levels.
They were not palette swaps. They were men and women who breathed and shifted their weight and smelled of oil and leather. Every visor turned to follow me as I clanked up the hall.
The throne sat on a dais at the far end. It was carved out of a single block of black stone and it was exactly as cold as it looked. I felt it through the plate when I sat down. I tried to sit the way the portrait sat, leaning back with my chin up, bored.
I'd never been less bored in my life.
A man stepped out of the line on the left. He wore black plate like mine, but older, scratched, with a commander's red sash across it. He was tall and heavy in the shoulders, with close-cropped grey hair and a face like a fist. He stopped at the foot of the dais and bowed exactly as far as courtesy required and not one inch farther.
Lord Commander Brannoc Hale. I knew him too. In the game he was the boss before the boss, the loyal general who held the gate in Act Three and died calling the Dread Lord's name.
He looked at me now like he was checking whether I was still the man he'd die for.
"Lord Commander," I said. I'd heard Pimm use the title, so I used it too.
"My lord. You slept late."
"I had a lot on my mind."
"So the castle says." His gaze moved to my left hand, the one I'd used on the stair wall, and the raw scrape on the gauntlet's knuckles. "The castle also says you caught a cup this morning. Without looking."
News traveled fast in Blackspire. I filed that away.
"Reflex," I said.
"Yours were always good." He didn't make it sound like a compliment. He made it sound like a fact he intended to keep checking. His voice was clipped, every word filed down to the edge. "The men are ready. They've been ready since the harvest."
"Ready," I said.
"For Emberford." Something moved behind his eyes when he said the name. Not anger. Appetite. "Torches, oil, a cordon on the river road so none get out. We ride at dusk on the Harvest Bonfire, as you ordered. I want the route confirmed. I want to know who carries the first torch."
The hall was silent. A hundred visors waited.
That was when the letters came.
They crawled along the bottom of my vision, white and steady, like the game's narration crawling across the screen during a cutscene. It was the same font and the same pace, one letter at a time, the pace that used to make me press the button to skip.
I couldn't skip it.
```status [SCRIPT] 10 Harrowmonth. The Dread Lord burns Emberford to the ground. ```
I remembered the cutscene that went with it. I'd watched it twelve times as a boy and three times as a man.
A village of golden thatch under a bonfire moon, and black-armored riders coming down off the ridge. The thatch going up, roof after roof, orange and screaming. A young woman with dark curly hair running for the river, a basket of herbs spilling, and a rider cutting her down at the water's edge. And then the farm boy coming home out of the woods with a brace of rabbits, dropping them, falling to his knees in the ash beside her. Screaming at the sky until the sky answered.
That was how the hero got his sword. That was how the game started.
I'd played it as a kid and I'd wanted the villain to win.
Now I was the villain, and I knew exactly how many people lived in that village. The game said two hundred, in the opening crawl. I'd never thought of them as people before. They were set dressing for a sad cutscene.
"My lord?" Brannoc said.
How many days? The caption said the tenth of Harrowmonth. I didn't know what today was.
"Pimm," I said. "The date."
"The first of Harrowmonth," Pimm said from somewhere behind the throne. "The first day of the month. As it is."
Nine days.
Nine days, I thought. I've launched frozen lasagna on less.
The thought was so stupid that it steadied me. I'd spent fifteen years telling rooms full of people that the product was ready when it wasn't. I knew how to stall a client.
"The plan," I said, "is being finalized."
Brannoc's eyes narrowed, just slightly.
"Finalized," he repeated.
"The details. The staging. I want this done properly, Lord Commander. I want it remembered." Every word was true. I just didn't mean them the way he heard them. "You'll have my orders tonight."
He didn't move for a long breath. He was a soldier and I'd just answered him like a consultant. I watched him decide whether that was a problem.
At last he bowed again, the same exact inch. He turned to go, and then he stopped and spoke over his shoulder. He didn't raise his voice. The hall was so quiet that every visor heard it anyway.
"Tonight, then, my lord. Or I'll start without you."
His boots rang all the way down the hall. The doors shut behind him.
I sat on the cold throne with my hands on its cold arms. The letters still crawled at the bottom of my vision, slow and patient, waiting for me to play my part. If I refused, an army that had loved its lord's cruelty would turn on me before the week was out. If I obeyed, two hundred people would burn on the tenth, and I'd be the one who lit them.
I had nine days, and both choices were wrong.
