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Simon’s dad left a long time ago; his mom seemed to be a step behind, working at a tragic little crafts store. He was smart, but in a way he didn’t ever quite value in himself. He was short and unpopular and had no visible means of support in the world other than that he genuinely loved computers and computer games, probably more than I loved anything.

In a certain way Simon… shamed me, I’m forced to say; something
about him gave the lie to what I was then. I wanted to be popular, I wanted to be very conventionally well thought of. I wanted a girlfriend and a car and a good college. I would have traded places with a lot of people. I was his friend, but I transparently didn’t want to be like him. I could never have stood it, being him. I was, I think, a contemptible little climber, waiting for something better to come along. If I could have, I would have been a lot more like Darren, charismatic and loud, always at the center. It’s fair to say that I was more a failed Darren than I was anything else.

Simon told me later about the walks he’d go on, through the baseball field to the trees bordering the ratty “Nature Woods.” He found himself on the shore of what they stupidly called the Lake, really just a large pond.

He stood on the beach, just a thin strip of sand and pine needles, letting the water lap at his sandals.

He needed
Realms
to save him, I think, more than the rest of us did. This was his summer, the summer of his life. For most of us—me, certainly—computer camp was a logical stopover, a little bit of college prep; a résumé builder; for Simon it was a last resort.

The day Simon lost it, at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Fights weren’t a part of KidBits; there wasn’t even much roughhousing. People were laughing. Simon self-evidently wasn’t a boxer—he clawed—and Darren’s advantage in reach only increased the farcical look of the contest.

Darren’s expression was somewhere between angry and amused, part of him still hoping to pass it off as a play fight, to bring Simon in and wrestle him out of it. But Simon was serious; there was blood on Darren’s forearms, and at some point he got a fingernail into Darren’s cheekbone that left a scar I could see fifteen years later. In the end Darren was left holding his oldest friend at arm’s length until four counselors could pull him away. Simon was panting, his pudgy face red and smeared, his shirt hanging half off. He’d torn it trying to get at Darren. Simon was escorted from the camp and put on a bus.

But the fight itself was forgotten an hour later, when word got out of something a lot more serious. Simon had managed to release a computer virus onto the KidBits servers; it erased a fair amount of data, mostly personal e-mail, as well as the grades database. A lot of people ended up getting free As because of it. But it wasn’t terribly sophisticated—in fact, it was an uncharacteristically clumsy piece of execution. There was no doubt as to where it came from.

It wasn’t anything more than juvenile mischief, but this was the heyday of teen hacker paranoia, of experts testifying soberly that one unsupervised kid could set off a nuclear war, and of federal agents breaking down the doors of unsocialized fourteen-year-olds. Once Simon was tagged as a computer criminal there was nothing even Darren could do to keep him from being prosecuted. He ended up with a hundred hours of community service and was lucky to get it; but his scholarship was revoked. Simon wouldn’t be going to college, then or ever.

It was a deep unsolved mystery, one Darren would never shed any light on. Was it about a girl? Was there a love triangle? That was the most popular theory, one with endless variants. Or was it creative differences, or just old business from the antediluvian past? All I could think of was how Simon could have explained it to his mother, whose vague ideas about the dangers of hacking, of computers as the gateway to cloudily imagined supercrime, would only be confirmed.

And the more I thought about it, the more serious it seemed, and I couldn’t help thinking Simon knew it. Simon and his mother had had early experience of downward mobility when his father left. Some part of him knew that his sullen refusal to engage in school was turning into more than just an adolescent funk, that it was self-dooming. But this was it for him, a clean break with the future. What was Simon thinking, on the long bus ride home? How would he save her now?

Five days afterward, at ten thirty on the last night of computer camp, Darren, Val, and I entered the computer lab for the first and last ever
official
Realms II
world championship. After some debate, we’d left the final slot open in honor of our fallen comrade rather than replace him with the second-place finisher from his bracket.

We sat down with the charged solemnity of a world-renowned string trio and a nameless feeling, something between pride and anticipatory bloodlust, that verged over into a round of pregame applause—for the finalists but mostly for ourselves, for the game, for the whole summer, for what it had all been for us. But when the applause was over there was still something left to be decided.

I’d always credited Darren with a showman’s instinct, but when the door slammed open every camper in the room turned and then froze. I didn’t want to meet Simon’s eyes. Ten long seconds passed, and then Darren stood and pulled the empty metal folding chair out from the table and gestured for Simon to take a seat. We went through the now-familiar routine of setting keyboard macros and setting starting parameters, the
Realms II
equivalent of rosining and tuning our instruments. The evening now promised carnage unparalleled. Each of the four of us was the sole survivor of two previous four-person matches averaging six hours apiece, and had watched half a dozen others.

I specced out a bandit kingdom made up of a mixture of humans, elves, and the odd faerie. I planned to lurk in the forest and prey on stragglers while the others slugged it out in the field. Whatever he was doing, Simon took the longest. In the long interval Darren held up two quarters to signal for a Mountain Dew. Val sipped her black coffee. When Simon slapped the return key, all choices had been entered, the lights were dimmed, and war in the realms commenced.

My scouts quickly sussed out the terms of the conflict. Darren’s forces looked like tenth-century Normandy, a tightly controlled balance of aggression and monetary craftiness along with a good deal of careful castle-building.

Val was lucky enough to spawn in a mountainous corner of the map. My scouts reported her walling off a passage in and out, then they stopped
reporting at all. My people vanished into the Perrenwood and started swallowing caravans whole. Nice, but I’d be noticed before long.

And Simon’s choices were… eccentric. His entire nation was made up of tiny bands of humans wandering the map. I saw a few of them hack down trees and build a galleon that sailed away before I could catch it. What was he doing? He seemed to have opted out entirely. Maybe Simon really wasn’t a fighter.

I harassed Darren’s militia while he huddled safely behind walls, playing Sheriff of Nottingham to my Robin Hood. I could bleed him, but once his castles were up they were proving impossible to dislodge. He took land and held it. He had just begun to get cocky again when the gates of Val’s enclave opened and (there is no other word for it) disgorged a horrifying army of daemons that ravaged and blackened the countryside as only the sons of a nation built on profane sorcery and purest evil can. We could practically hear the crackling flames and panicked horses. Castles that a few turns ago looked like permanent chunks of landscape were being reduced to sad little rubble icons, which after a few years blinked into peaceful little grassy icons. One hour in, Darren signaled for another Mountain Dew. I spotted him the fifty cents.

I waited for him to crack, for the weakness to show under his cocky exterior, but two things saved him. He put his king into the field. It was a grave risk, but it was the only thing that would put heart into feudal lordlings who were almost visibly shitting themselves. And on the next turn, the familiar icon of a man with an oversize sword presented itself at Darren’s capital. Legendary Brennan the warrior had joined Darren’s cause.

Gradually, desperately, Darren slowed, stopped, and reversed Val’s advance. But Val had another card to play: Lorac the wizard. Further, it was the rare Inverse Lorac, the tiny wizard drawn in white on a black tile to indicate that this was the sorcerer’s evil incarnation. This was the first game to put three Heroes on the board. I watched from the safety of the forests as a last great war of light against dark was contested.

But when the turn counter reached 446 of the Third Age, my screen blanked itself and the map was simply replaced by a tally of personnel, wealth, and territory. I’d never seen the Game Over screen before; I didn’t realize what it was until I saw the entire room looking at me. Darren stood and led a brief, respectful round of applause. The bandit king was dead, and I didn’t even see it happen. I was too shell-shocked to feel the sting of it yet.

It wasn’t either Darren or Val; they were obviously dumbfounded, and Simon didn’t even look up. Spooked, they nonetheless rushed to claim the eastern forestland I’d been stalking since year one. Ultimately, Darren was simply better placed for it. Inside two turns he was cutting timber, building siege engines, and ridding the world of evil at an admirable rate. Val fell back to the mountains, still contesting the field but already looking done. Simon was still technically in the game, which meant that attrition hadn’t claimed all his wanderers yet. But short of a miracle, Darren was going to be the
Realms II
champion of KidBits, Western Massachusetts, and Planet Earth. I felt unexpectedly disappointed. He already acted like this belonged to him and had for weeks; he shouldn’t have it. I wanted it to be Simon, but his game looked like a preemptive concession.

The bitter fighting in the mountains was all but over, and on the very same turn that the spider queen fell, the tattered sons of Simon’s horde came into view of Darren’s rear guard. I think we all assumed that Simon was now sportingly presenting himself for termination so as to let the game end.

Darren’s forces met him on the field, the king personally commanding. Simon’s people had stats as individual fighters, but the king’s escorts were all elite heavies of their type, and they outnumbered Simon’s entire country.

The sides touched and bodies began piling up, and then Darren’s left flank began falling in on itself, its numbers swallowed as if a black hole had formed in its ranks, centered on a single fighter. Darren ID’d it. A
star indicated that it was Simon’s sovereign unit, his king, inexplicably placed at the front lines.

Simon’s king was an apparent nobody, a midlevel fighter in a half helm, wooden shield, and chain mail. But listed in the weapon slot was a piece of inventory called Mournblade.

The room was on its feet in a babble of voices. Out of sixty-three campers, no one failed to grasp the grave provenance of that eloquent portmanteau.

Mournblade. The author Michael Moorcock wrote a series of novels starring the antiheroic Elric of Melniboné, the last king of a doomed race, a tall albino with long hair and amazing cheekbones and a hereditary frailty owing to his weak, rarefied, inexpressibly noble blood. Isolated by his gloomy destiny, he wanders through a world torn by an endless war between Law and Chaos. He also carries a huge, extremely handy black sword carved with eldritch runes called Stormbringer, a sword that absorbs the soul of anyone it kills and gives Elric the strength to get through the day. It’s horrendously cursed, of course; in fact, it’s really a daemon that will one day devour him. (In the plus column, in the far, far future, as the solar system goes into decline, Stormbringer will have absorbed so many souls that its energy will be used to reignite the dying sun and save humanity.)

I was extremely murky on the rest of it, but I did remember that Stormbringer had a duplicate named Mournblade, an equally powerful but apparently less ambitious cousin that wandered in and out of the various books on its own business, which was rarely explained.

Why shouldn’t Simon use it? He probably had Excalibur, Glamdring, Durendal, and the Sword of Shannara wandering around in there, too. But the one he wielded had to be Mournblade—it was black and uncanny and runic—but more than that, it fit Simon. I could just see him lying in bed staring up at the ceiling and thinking “God, I am so Elric,” having the inner certainty that on some level he was the lonely king of a lost people and a land that was no more.

Loose in the world, it was just a tiny icon of a standard broadsword, with a black border and a tiny squiggle or two on the blade denoting the fact that it was deeply incised with obscene carvings and cryptic runes. It was Endoria’s first artifact-class item: unique, overwhelmingly powerful, storied, and cursed. Darren simply stopped play and brought up the Help file, in which Mournblade had been duly entered, if anyone had thought to look for it. It wasn’t a complex bit of code, just a simple piece of algorithmic hatred:

a) Any attack by a unit wielding Mournblade would kill automatically.

b) Anyone holding the sword would slowly lose hit points, one per two rounds. Not immediately lethal, but a ticking clock nonetheless.

c) Any time you killed a unit it restored two hit points, which meant that as long as you had enemies to kill you had nothing to worry about; in fact, it would prove terribly difficult to bring you down.

d) Once you picked up Mournblade you couldn’t drop it, ever.

There were a few more details to fill in. Mournblade could destroy objects such as siege works, but that wouldn’t restore life to the wielder. And there was a 10 percent chance that it would attack an adjacent friendly unit, even if you didn’t want it to.

Anyone foolish enough to pick up the cursed thing could be an unbeatable champion in war, but thereafter the logic of the item turned grim. You’d end up wandering Endoria in search of victims, ultimately turning on the few friends you had left. It was a tiny encoded curse, a few simple rules that, combined in a single item, gave rise to a lonely, haunted destiny.