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You walk through the concentric walls of the old city, crumbling like smoke rings in the air, and into cobblestone streets. The sunset is banded with red, orange, and yellow, as elegant as it can be in the sixteen-color palette. The parallax effect is soothing and hypnotic. There is an armorer’s stall and I buy Leira a shield striped in blue and white.

“Stop,” said Lorac. “I will show you things few mortals ken. For this is WAFFLE, and mine is a dark knowledge.”

The renderer showed us what the world looked like, but Simon’s world engine WAFFLE pulled its strings. No one knew everything about how it worked. All they had was the API, the application programming interface (as laboriously explained to me by the guy sitting next to me that day, whose name I never successfully learned)—it fed parameters in and got data out, but it didn’t mess with what was inside. Simon built WAFFLE and he died, and left a black box at the heart of Black Arts.

Lorac led me through the rules.

a) It was a simulation, and it was pretty bossy. Designers didn’t run the economy, it did. If you wanted to say that a suit of leather
armor cost ten gold pieces, you couldn’t tell it that. You might be able to jiggle a dozen other variables into place so that leather armor logically
had
to cost ten gold pieces. Or you could just let WAFFLE charge what it wanted to charge.

b) Objects and creatures acted the same way over a great many different contexts. A dagger was a dagger—as a character, you could pick up the dagger and use it. Any creature in the world, player-controlled or not, could also use it (provided the creature had hands, or a sufficiently prehensile tail).

c) Objects had a set of properties that made the same sense everywhere. An iron dagger was a weapon that could damage creatures; it could also damage certain objects (such as a length of rope). An iron dagger was magnetic; stone and bronze daggers were not. Flint struck against it would make a spark, and so forth.

d) Characters and creatures in the game had a decent amount of native artificial intelligence; in danger they would flee. They would pick up desirable loose objects, which was why that skeleton had looted my body the night I had played the game and discovered the bug. Later programmers had extended and added on to these behaviors, but the core remained. Like the simulator itself, character behavior wasn’t always easy to control.

e) Lastly, the engine (which is to say, Simon) was a complete bastard about saving your game. For a given character, it would save a record of your game when you quit; it would load that record when you started again. You couldn’t save during a game and keep playing, which meant that you couldn’t, for instance, save the game and then try something stupid or risky and then just reload your game if it didn’t work. The effect was that you played through as a single continuous narrative.

This last piece of code was one of a number of features that reflected deeply held ideas about video games that Simon had encoded into the
system. Apparently he thought it helped players invest in the game as real; real risk, real consequences.

Its real effect, ultimately, was to limit the extent of the Black Arts audience—not everyone wanted to take these games that seriously. Sometimes they just wanted to goof around and try things. On the other hand, it also created a hardened core of Black Arts loyalists who would buy every game and who at parties would get into long philosophical arguments about the use of the Save command in games.

And no one, anywhere, knew what the letters in WAFFLE stood for.

“Okay, now what?”

“Play the damn game,” said Prendar.

A small plaza well back in the merchants’ quarter. A modest cobblestone circular plaza and, in the center, a worn-down statue of a bear on its hind legs silhouetted black against the purpling sky.

It’s almost nightfall when Leira sees the tavern’s light ahead, the Duke and Dancer. A shield hangs on the wall outside, the griffin sigil of Darren’s old kingdom. She ducks under the low door frame and steps inside. Self-conscious, she keeps a hand on the hilt of one long blade just to make sure it’s still there. There are two lanterns hanging from a thick wooden beam overhead, a beam that must have been cut from a hundred-year-old tree, a tree that probably never heard a word of Common spoken in its lifetime. A fire is going at the far end of the room, and everything smells like wood smoke and beer and sweaty people. It’s warm after a day of walking in the rain, and her cloak steams a little. The stew is salty and the dark ale is bitter and incredibly good.

The tavern is full of two dozen men, and Leira is comfortable being lost in the din. She’s small and used to not being noticed; it’s a talent. Most of the men are farmers and craftsmen, there every night of their lives, but the inn hosts a few travelers, too.

She thinks back over the day’s walk. Video game characters are only
half there except when you’re involved. But the whole saga is built around their roles in the world, half you, half them, a grand-scale millennial puppet theater.

You know from writing the TDR that as a playable character Leira has a high movement rate and great bonuses on ranged attacks. But you know so much more about her, even more than the computer does, because inside the outlines there is what you put into them, so much more memory and awareness and feeling, a whole country of it. And as the evening wears on, she thinks, or perhaps you think, about a summer night in a storybook castle long ago, before the wars began.

You had skin under your fingernails. The prince crouched, cursing, and spat on the floor. You scanned the gallery. It was empty. The mirrored walls showed only candlelight, paneling, your strange, ashen face.

The ball was still at its height. It was the day you’d been looking forward to since you turned thirteen, the thing you’d lorded over your younger sisters. You were going to have a ball. You were wearing the pale green dress you’d forgone a horse for, and saw for the first time how poorly it suited you. You heard your father’s too-loud laugh over the music and the crowd. You tried to imagine how you would explain this to him. It seemed so implausible. You had always been the proper lady to your sister’s tomboy. You were the one they expected to marry off early. Nothing was going to prevent that—or was it?

Flustered, you cast around and settled on a silver candlestick. You held on to your skirt with one hand to keep from tripping over it as you swung the other hand in a broad, hearty sidearm motion that brought the candlestick’s thick, square base into contact with the prince’s kneecap. It must be midnight by now, you thought, and there were an enormous number of decisions to be made in a short time.

Enter Lorac. He has low hit points and armor but above-average foot speed. He has high intelligence, a wisdom bonus, three extra languages. Metal armor is forbidden; metal weapons are used at a major penalty.
The spell caster allows four specialties. All magic items operate with a bonus. There is a 20 percent chance that he will be able to evade the effects of cursed items.

In
Realms III
Lorac has a range of powers that get him through his obstacles. A gesture that lets him drift slowly through the air instead of falling; a word that shatters nearby objects. For all his age, he looks unruffled by the obstacles. When the rain comes he adjusts his hat, but that’s all. In town he gets to choose new robes. When he enters the tavern he gives Leira a sidelong look but doesn’t speak to her. In the firelight he looks a little like one of the three kings of the Nativity scene.

He wasn’t a king but he might have been a king’s vizier, a cunning man and master of many subtle arts. One of the ones who secretly lusts for power, and one day he betrays the king.

Why? It’s hard to remember, just that every step seemed at the time like the logical and smart and easy way to play it. Maybe it wasn’t before, but now it’s what you do. It’s your story.

You saw your moment. The king wasn’t watching, and you stole the key to the royal aviary, in which there was a magic bird whose magic songs foretold the future. Of course it went wrong. You’re not royalty and you’re not the hero of the story. You’re just a civil servant with a prelaw degree and a flair for languages. What made you think you could hang with the royals? Princes and kings have this kind of story in their blood.

When the king came back you panicked like a fool. Your sorcery lit the tower, but he tossed you into the moat anyway. It was the birdseed you bought, in the marketplace, the day you were wearing that disguise. It wasn’t that good a disguise, was it? Who knew a king would have those kinds of connections on the street? If they’d enacted the educational reforms you’d asked for, those fucking urchins would have been in school, where they belong.

The townsfolk threw vegetables as you limped, dripping and sobbing, through town. The worst of it is, that king really liked you. He was a genuinely nice guy, never made you feel bad about the money thing from the first
day you roomed together. As vizier you lived at the palace, ate with his family, played with his children, showed everybody magic tricks, and told stories from your early life, before the days of jewelry and fancy hats.

You pawned your scepter of office for enough money to book passage out of the kingdom. No more dining on pheasant, no more carpets, no more starlit desert nights. You never wanted to see that place again. There are other lands, other kingdoms. You walked north until no one had heard of your crimes. You’ll go as far as your movement points will take you.

You rode on barges, slept out on deck under the stars, bargained with men in their own tongues. At first your academic diction marked you as a stranger, but gradually you picked up their vernacular rhythms, dropped the subject and your fancy tenses. You crossed the continent’s central desert in the company of a caravan, entertained their children with fire tricks from a first-year alchemy class you dug out of your memory. In return, a wiry, tan man taught you the basics of fighting with a short blade by grabbing your arms and yanking them into position. You left the caravan at the foot of a mountain range, and you kept going.

In the mountains you learned another form of magic, whatever’s fast and cheap. There was no time for a three-hour warm-up, and there was no place to get powdered peacock bone; there was only time to shout or make a rapid sketch in the dirt. You lay by your fire, looking up at the stars, and your days at the academy, your days in the king’s court, all of it seemed far off, which is what you’d like, really. Farther, if you could possibly get it.

On the far side of the mountain, the country was different. You met your first dwarves. They’d heard of your country, but maybe one in four could name the king, and none could speak the language.

You moved north through the forest lands while the long summer lasted, following the track of a lazy green river. At night you heard bats hunting in the warm air. You crossed a low stone wall that once marked the border of a farm. No one had lived there for centuries. You had never felt that alone, or that free. After weeks of travel you reached the northern ocean, and walked east.

Caracalla is a city you didn’t know, a northern city that trades with the hunting and mining tribes. No one you knew, no one from your family, had ever been there. At first, tradesmen looked askance at your currency. You decided to wait a few days before booking passage north.

You slept alone at an inn that first night, lying awake long into the dark. The city was never quite silent. You heard bells, here and there a shout, the yowl of a cat, or hooves. You smelled horses, dirt, the ocean.

In the darkness you thought again about who you were before this, a life you remember less and less well, but what you remember doesn’t flatter you. You remembered lying to people about what you were thinking and feeling. You remembered constantly thinking about how unhappy you were. It was very different from the way you are now, before you wore a dagger and slept in forests.

You fell asleep trying to count days, trying to guess how many weeks are left before the snow will cut off the mountain passes. In the morning you learned how to negotiate with a sailor. You’re not sure if you’re here for forgetfulness or redemption, but you notice they’re not calling you a vizier anymore. They call you a wizard.

Brennan has an easy time on the road. High strength, endurance, hit points, medium speed. All weapons usable, bonus with long sword or dagger. When the rain comes he lets it fall on his broad bare shoulders, but ties his long hair up in a bun over his round, boyish face. Bandits are nothing to him, he’s—God, twelfth level or something. He faced down the spider queen herself in her mountain lair. He can let his mind wander.

There was a yellow patch in the snow by the side of the roadway. They stood around it, eight of them, mildly puzzled. There was a faint smell of wood smoke, but otherwise the mountains were silent.

Your two cousins exchanged glances behind your back. They were each fifteen years older, almost twice your age, but a few inches shorter. You outranked them by birth, but they’d ridden this way a dozen times before, and
the bearers had long since stopped looking at you for confirmation of your orders.

Your father was getting older, and your brother was spending more and more time running the place, so it was your turn to ride out with the annual tribute caravan, through the pass and over the mountains you’d heard of but never seen, carrying your family’s third-best sword to the stronghold of the House of Aerion.

“Bandits, maybe. We’ll go have a look,” Eran said, the dark one. The two older men set off through the trees, up a short ridge and out of sight, one looking back to make sure you and the others stayed put. But the snow was half a foot deep and it was getting on to sunset, and the other men got cold fast. The wait was awkward; the party had run out of things to chat about an hour into the first day.

What if your cousins weren’t coming back? What was happening? Sound didn’t carry well in the snow. After ten minutes of looking at the other men and the darkening sky, you cleared your throat and said, “I’ll just look. To see what’s happening.”