021 – 748 Years Ago (Part One)

021 – 748 Years Ago (Part One)

“—Fuck, what just happened!? Sound off, Karravar [kava]! …Okay, that’s [Blackbright], [Laureate_King], [sunny_side_up], [Hadrian’s_Fyre]… What, [Ayle]? [Ayle] had something to take care of IRL, she shouldn’t even be in-game right now, so—wait, what? What do you mean she’s comatose!?”

—Player [Stormold] to his guildmates, Transmigration Day, 758 Years Ago

“You’re sure you’ve got it covered, Fala?” Aedan confirmed for what seemed like the hundredth time, rushing around his office in the Varranir operating base of Karravar [kava].

“Yes, Karravar Ehdan, sir! Leave it to me!” The excitable girl chirped in response.

“And if you run into a problem you can’t solve on your own?” Aedan prodded. Fala furrowed her eyebrows in thought for a moment, until she lit up like a Christmas tree as she remembered what he’d told her earlier that morning.

“I should go find Big Bro Jeyol, because you gave him a way to contact you while you’re away.” She beamed at him, apparently pleased with herself. Fala was always eager to please—and was an exemplary student to boot. Aedan had never regretted taking in the orphans that had come out of Titanomachy, but Fala was magically gifted in a way none of his other pupils were. It was almost like teaching a teenaged Ai.

It had been ten years since the Players of A Dirge for the Sun had been abruptly transmigrated to Varrah, but Aedan still hoped that she’d just wake up out of the blue and start bossing them around like she used to back during the good old days. Nostalgia tugged at his heartstrings, so he turned the emotion into a smile for Fala.

“Alright. Then I’ll leave you to it.” Aedan scrunched his lower lip up to goof up his auburn—not grey yet, he was still in his thirties, thank you very much—beard. Fala had always responded well when he made strange faces as a child, and even now that hadn’t changed. He patted Fala on the shoulder a couple of times, the movement awkward with his thickly gloved hand.

“Have fun, sir!” Fala chirped again.

“I always do!” Aedan laughed, feeling his chest rumble with nascent power as the laughter accelerated his heartbeat. He routed the potential through Eye of the Storm, which was in its usual holster at his hip.

Better get going.

He skipped out of the office—as much as a six-foot eight giant of a man in big, stompy boots could skip—eager to get going. Aedan MacLeod was many things, but he’d be damned if he was ever late to the yearly Karravar [kava] reunion.

Outside of the office, it was a sunny Varran day with not a cloud in sight. The crater of Varranir, the site of the final battle of Titanomachy, had become a bustling hotspot for activity over the last ten years. Pilgrims from all over the lands of Varrah were converging on Varranir, eager to settle in what was quickly becoming a new center of safety, security, and commerce.

Aegis Origa [ORIGA] had leveraged their logistical reach and position as co-leader of the Coalition of Frontline Guilds to become the de facto power of the region. Not that the politics mattered much to Aedan; it just wasn’t worth the hassle to butt heads with the power-hungry fools. From the moment it had become apparent that the game had become reality, they’d started with their shenanigans as if their alliance had never mattered.

As long as the people’s needs were being met though, Aedan couldn’t care less who was in charge.

Th-thump. Th-thump.

Aedan let his heartbeat mount, each beat sending a current of electromagnetic potential coursing through his veins. [Eye of the Storm] responded in kind.

Th-thump. Th-thump.

Aedan let each beat of his heart carve its familiar shape into reality, and his Semblance made it so.

[The-Heart-That-Beats-Like-Thunder].

He reached a hand out to the sky, feeling his auburn hair begin to stand on end as static electricity sparked all around him—

—With a deafening crackle and the booming of lightning, a bolt of electricity slammed down from the skies into his waiting hand.

Fala had followed him out, accompanied by a few of the younger orphans as she did. They cheered and hollered as the lightning hit, and Aedan couldn’t help but grin like a loon. It was wasteful, to be sure, but he loved showing off for the kids.

“Be good, everyone!” He shouted, and extended his senses along the path the lightning had carved through the atmosphere. He ran through the conceptual links for [Fantastic Electromagnetic Railroad], and as his Semblance pressed the spell into reality, he felt the familiar yanking of his transportation spell pull him into the air along the lightning’s trajectory.

Strictly speaking, he could access the Glassway from the ground. But where was the fun in that?

A few moments later, he was high above the crater of Varranir, the Karravar [kava] office a speck in the distance. He reached out with his senses again, this time feeling for the telltale Semblance of the Glassway. It didn’t take long for his guild’s custom fast travel system to recognize him, and the sky in front of him shattered open in a glittering eruption of magic. He disengaged [Fantastic Electromagnetic Railroad], allowing the Glassway’s magic to pull him into the fast travel corridor.

Reality seemed to crackle and twinkle, sparkling like glitter all around Aedan as he zoomed across the continent of Varrah. He always thought that transit through the Glassway was rather pretty, sounding like thousands of tiny bells clinking and chiming.

The world below disappeared into a blur of yellows, browns, greens, and blues. Within minutes, he had crossed the continent, leaving the Tranquil Sea far behind him. Aedan flew beyond the Varran Desert, over the Northern Wilds, the waters of the Trident, and past the Unruled Plains, far to the northeast of Dirge’s explorable area back during the game. So much of the world was now entirely new, completely uncharted territory.

Karravaran was just ahead.

Soon after the Transmigration, [Blackbright] had floated the idea of moving Karravaran from its location above Varrah, far beyond the edges of the known world, and even further beyond the reach of their enemies. The entire guild had agreed unanimously. Nobody wanted even the slightest risk of their enemies—and even their current allies—discovering [Ayle] as she rested, after all.

It was a scant seven minutes later that Aedan arrived at the base of the guild hall. Karravaran floated high above the planet below, hovering in the liminal gap between the [World-Stage] and [Outside-Void], a shining, alabaster-white castle on a platform of jagged stone. Karravaran’s blade-like spires of white-gold reached up into the stars, reflecting the sunlight that shone impossibly bright in the almost nonexistent atmosphere, a sculpture hanging in the black of space.

To borrow science fiction terms, they had turned Karravaran into a space station hanging over Varrah in low geosynchronous orbit.

It hadn’t started that way, to be sure. Years ago, Ai had wanted to build a castle in the sky, a guild hall that couldn’t be matched by any other Player organization in the game. What they would come to call Karravaran had begun its existence as a mid-tier Player home that he and Ai had purchased and developed high up in the Vayash mountains that bordered the Varran Desert to its east—a mountain range that in another timeline would one day become known as the Appalachians. A modest fortress set up in cloudy peaks, overlooking the desert and from where their newly founded guild could base its operations.

Stolen novel; please report.

Where their competitors like Aegis Origa [ORIGA], Olympos [godz], and others, were content to use their guilds’ real estate to manage on-site Non-Player Character assets or to control actual territory in the gameworld, Karravar [kava] went all in on magical development to push the boundaries of what was possible within Dirge’s game engine. They didn’t rely on NPC labor, after all. All of their output was theorycrafted and built through their own efforts.

They were a small guild, at first just he and Ai. Then two became three, then four, and more. [Hadrian’s_Fyre], [Laureate_King], [else_eption], [Blackbright], [Fenocian], [sunny_side_up], [dragon_of_suzhou], [Prometheus], [beefus_maximus], [scryczar], and [behrouz].

By the time Titanomachy had begun, Karravar [kava] had already lifted Karravaran into the sky. When they completed the Glassway not too long after, they turned their combined intellect to integrating its magic into Karravaran’s foundations. As long as the Glassway remained protected from intrusion, the only avenue for ingress a would-be attacker could even take was to go the long way up.

The list of Players able to independently reach that altitude, or otherwise send an attack to orbit was vanishingly short. There were two clear reasons their guild of thirteen Players—if you were to include their guild leader—could match the combined might of Aegis Origa [ORIGA] as equal partners in the Coalition when they numbered in the hundreds: Magical expertise and orbital superiority.

And now, Karravaran was even more impenetrable—no, inaccessible—than it had been back then.

Aedan heard the Glassway’s clinking and twinkling begin to wind down and prepared to land. The main pavilion of Karravaran opened up beneath him, its white-gold architecture catching the sunlight. Thirteen alcoves ringed a central pavilion in a semicircle, each assigned to a Karravar [kava] member and built to the specifications of its owner. They were personal shrines of a sort, each connected to a bespoke, spatially-compressed magical storage system containing all of the gear they didn’t want to lug around all the time. Some of them even made entire personal rooms inside their hammerspace alcoves.

Aedan’s own alcove was one such personal space, a workshop designed like a forge with an attached study. Others were wilder, stranger. More idiosyncratic. For example, [Hadrian’s_Fyre]’s loot stash had morphed into a literal booze cellar over the years.

But the thing that drew his eye—that always drew his eye—was at the center of the pavilion, elevated slightly above the other alcoves on a dais of white stone. A sarcophagus rested there, its transparent lid shimmering faintly with the steady pulse of a preservation weave. Inside it, [Ayle]—Ai—lay as she had for the past ten years. Perfectly still and untouched by time or decay.