The higher they fly,

  For a few wonderful minutes, it was just her and the silent forest. The sound of fire rolling across the river faded as she ran, and apparently whatever spell he had used to speak to her couldn’t work unless he had her detected. Damn, she might actually escape.

  She brought up the map in her avatar’s memory. Her avatar had a high recall stat, so it lit up in vivid detail in a kind of overy. If she moved north, away from the ke, deeper into the forest, he would be uo find her. It was just too massive. She just had to get around that raised cluster of sheer cliff-faced hills to the northwest and—

  The sound of fire returned with a vengeand the forest ahead of her broke into a molten glow.

  “I would rather take you alive.” His voied from above rising tauntingly at the end.

  “I think you could do great work for the Cloth. But you’re running out of rope—”

  He cut off suddenly, as if he was trying to find a better metaphor. She stopped still and waited. Less than a mier, the forest roared behind her, and the air grew warm and hazy.

  Shit.

  She burst through the foliage into a creek bed, where a thin finger of s water winded down, oblivious to the doom closing in. She gnced in the air, and her nightsight gred off the smoke.

  Good, so he couldn’t see her either. Truly an amateur Dragonrider if there ever was one.

  She ran up the creek bed, keepiwilight cloak tight around her and staying uhe branches, just in case.

  “So what is your pn?” his booming voice broke in again, like a police helicopter loudspeaker, broken and stretched thihe smoke-clogged air.

  “Wait until the forest burns down and I have to find you standing on a pile of ash? What’s the point?” He tried to paper over his frustration with a level of mock . Even in the distorted state of his voice, she could se.

  This had to be the strahing that had ever happeo her in this fug game. She had never even heard of a Dragonrider singling out a lone avatar outside of some kind of iation. She could only think of one expnation for it, and it made her skin crawl.

  “All right, enjoy your run to that mountain,” his voied again. “Unfortunately, I’ve got to go burn some things, but I’ll be back.”

  She was reminded of a kid she used to py Magic with who always talked like an anime vilin. The kind of guy Malthuseus would weed out of their a heartbeat. How did a guy like that get a dragon? Arthel sold avatars and starting items and skins for top MEM, but dragons were supposed to be outside the memstore market. You had to py the avatar from the bottom and work up to it, no shortcuts.

  Someone was getting banned, but it was now a question of how much this guy could fuck up her lifeline before that happened.

  As she ran, the mountain rose up above the trees, glowing like an early dawn as the forest fire grew. Subtle sensations in her legs and chest told her that her avatar was nearing exhaustion. Half the slope, as the trees thinned and the sensations became arms, she had made up her mind.

  She would scale the sheer cliff face of the peak, find some recess or cave, if possible, her twilight cloak around her, and put her avatar to double sleep, a near vegetative state that replenished exhaustion twice as fast, but left the avatar uo react or awaken, as goal to return to camp.

  Then, Lindsey would log out of Arthel and try not to think about it. Maybe drop into a Hardworld or try that pirate sim Maverick had been raving about, and if she came ba a day or two and her avatar was a bck ashen smear on the side of the mountain, she’d make a new one. Maybe something more direct like a battle mage, or a Paragon. Maybe something with dragonsyer as ae capstone. Give herself something to work towards, at least.

  The slope met the mountain at a right angle of jagged rock fragments and boulders. She started to pick her the fa a frustratingly slow meander. From the maps, she khat somewhere up the sheer face was some kind of staircase or path, and the peak cradled the broken ruin of an open-air temple. The only other note had been a e half a decade ago; “No loot :(“

  The wind had picked up and the air gre, intensifying the st of wet and burning forest. As she pulled herself up onto a wide stone ledge, the battlefield caught her eye in the distance, and she brought up her farsight der.

  The sun had finally abahe pin, but it remained remarkably lit. Fire flickered everywhere. Magies glimmered like neon soap bubbles. Spells fshed like sparklers, fireflies, lcd strobes, spotlights and lightning. Infantry struggled to get to the magi. Magi bored to obscure the charge of the calvary. Archers and artillery hoped for a hail Mary by volume, a stray bolt lucky enough to slip through and cut a magi down.

  Above it all, and sometimes down among it, the dragons cshed. Their fire bloomed in the air and fell in torrents. In some pces, the vex arrows formed between two barrier domes for instahe dragonfire pooled and flowed, evidence of an hours-long fight. A dragon in Arthel could keep spitting fire as long as it had fuel, and a few dives in the infantry gave enough sustenance for another half hour of fme. She ted five of them, mostly fighting each other. The trick was to be the only dragon on the field, then—

  “Ah, there you are.” His voice was right in her ear now, and she felt her skin vibrate in a way she knew meant a magical lock. How the fuck—

  “Your twilight cloak isn’t so good against the rock I’m afraid. At least not when it es tonsight.”

  Lindsey let the anger boil out of her. In her head she said all kinds of shit about him, but her Avatar simply stood and looked to the sky, letting the cloak hang at her back. It was a moonless night, perfect fon attacks, but the air above the peak was humming soft e. She knew he was somewhere far above it. Maybe she could tease him into flying closer, or even nding, with the right words. She flipped open the fp on her bow holster aed her hand on the wooden tip. If only she had saved that crystal arrow.

  “I’ve been watg you,” he said, apparently hoping that stating the obvious would fall as some kind of dramatic revetion. She wondered what video game character he was dressed up as. Breaking the wall was against the iron rules of the principalities, and punished more harshly thaagaming, but guys like him were always trying to find ways around it, and the fact that he had weaseled his a dragon—

  “You are wasted on the Wovenleaf forces. Leading ambushes on supply trains is beh you. You should be cutting down anders and Guild Lords, even Kings. You should be draped in chameleon cloth and armed with liquid mithril bdes. This pce hasn’t had a good assassin in years.”

  Lindsey would have told him that was because invis assassinations hadn’t been viable in almost ten years, that any officer higher than a vice admiral had some kind of body double, and every guild lord and king up to the three Emperors used a bination of es, wards, misunication and ht lies about who was even really in charge, and that there was a non-zero ce at least one Emperor was actually a level 0 avatar that could be remade and reborn in a heartbeat if someone mao get the knifework done, because the real power behind the throne was almost certainly about 20 pyers who had read everythi ever wrote, judging from his ret speeches, but, knowing this would be a waste of time, she chose to fuck with him and hope an adamant arrow would be enough to do something about his God damn talking.

  “Gee, you really think I’m that good. Or maybe you want to put another kind of liquid bde in my hand.”

  It was silent for a bit. Clearly whatever script he had prepared for this versation hadn’t included this.

  “I’m sure you're used to that sort of thing, so I’ll five you for thinking so low of me—”

  Lindsey scoffed ihroat

  “But I don’t think with my dick. I want to make you a real offer. I would like to be your patron—”

  “I’m already sworn to someohough. A Moss Shaman.”

  “I respect your honor, but I’m sure I could vince him to relinquish your vow, or even to swear you over to me. You’ll find most men have a price, and my ventures have made me quite wealthy.”

  Fug pay-to-sy firmed.

  “Well, I don’t know if he’ll go for it. He likes having me around, cause of all the fug and stuff.”

  There was another windblown silenow she had really gone off script.

  “You’re joking,” he said, a hollowed-out statement with a soggy question stuffed inside. “I’ve given you the ce to save yourself, to achieve something great, and now you are mog me. If you would rather—”

  “So you gonna e down here and pick me up or what?”

  Another silehe wind kicked up around her, but this time it was damp and carried the st of wet ash and forest.

  “Go to the edge of the cliff, to your east. Cast your bow and ons off the side. When I nd, you will khen your new life will begin.”

  “My bow was a gift.”

  “I will get you the fi—”

  “Yeah, I know you’re rich, but this one is like, seal.”

  “Well, you have to destroy the old to begin the new.”

  In one of those overly dramatients that Arthel seemed to breed like they were programed into its makeup, it started to rain, and lightning fshed bright purple behind the clouds, silhouetting his dragohan a hundred yards above her, diving down to nd.

  “Ok then.” She gripped the fletg on an adamantine arrow and drew.

  “Go ahead and torch me then, so I start a new run.”

  “You fug—” his voice cut off as the ember started up in the dragons throat. She saw the rider in his half cockpit style saddle, illuminated by the jet of fme shooting towards her. She let the arrow fly without thinking a out of the way as the wot hot.

  A quirk of all avatar games, one never quite extinguished, is that sometimes the pain of dying jumps the gap and is the Spirit, which recreates the pain almost perfectly. The best expnation she had heard was that it was a kind of defense meism to let the Spirit know the body is in danger. A vestigial process left over from the Spirits ins in the Real. A horrifying thought, it was also, ironically, what made the avatar games so attractive to many. A ce to experience real pain ah, or to inflict it on others, risk free.

  As she rolled across the stone a her twilight cloak catch fire, she really hoped this time it would spare her.

  “Shit!” he said, his voiing, and she prayed her arrow had found something vital. She whipped off her cloak a roll and in the wind as she came to a stop on a shimmering sliver of stone ledge, stuck between a rising wall of fire and a dark void with a fshing horizon of rolling thuorm at the edge. The twilight monocle had fallen off her fa the roll, but she saw the tail of the dragon, lit up by the firelight, as it zipped off into the sky.

  The rain picked up. The drops felt as big as golf balls. The line of fme hissed and steamed. Stone cracked and popped. Dragonfire floated atop a mudslide that flowed just yards away from her down the mountain and poured off into the dark forest.

  Suddenly, a flutter of lightning danced across the forest like someone was firing it from space. The river lit up beh it like a snaking neon mirror, and she remembered something from her days of researto the area.

  “You still there?” She shouted.

  “Why, ged your mind? I’m afraid it's too te to—”

  “No, I was just w why you weren’t down at the battlefield.”

  “Worried about your friends? Their left fnk colpsed, I heard, but don’t worry. I’ll be there to finish—”

  “No, I mean like, are you afraid of fighting other dragons?”

  Another, final silence.

  “No,” he spat. “Actually, I’ve—”

  In another one of those Arthelian dramatients, a low groaning, like a whale song with a rougher texture, skipped across the trees and up the mountain side. Lindsey smiled at the sky and hoped he could see it.

  “Good,” she said.

  The wind knocked her to the ground and the air was thick with water, as if she had gotten on the wrong end of a diffused fire hose. The dragonfire line rolled white with steam and she heard the mountain make all kinds of sounds as gcier sized pieud and stone sheared off the side. She mao get her nightsight monacle positioned in time to see it.

  Breaking out of the chopping river, flowing up like a snake in water, with prismatic multi-seed wings that looked more ioid theilian and glimmering scales of opalest aqua green, the river dragon threw a wall of pure thuorm, dense and grey as liquid crete, right into the fleeing dragon, then spit a flurry of ball lightning into the .

  “Fug god damn random enter bullshit!”

  The e cracked off, and Lindsey ughed. A deafening lightning strike outliwo dark silhouettes for a beautiful sed, then there was only the storm and even the dragon roars faded. She breathed in the rain-thick air owice, then as she exhaled into the chopping mist, the most beautiful noise burst through the rain, the sound of something massive onballing into a body of water half a mile away.

  Then it was just her and the storm.

  The rain flowed in thick streams around her ankles, poured off the cliffside in solid panes, frothed somewhere far below in newborn pools, and soaked her pletely. The mudslide took ses of burning cliffside with it and steaming stumps of trees and popping pockets onfire, carrying it all off into the foggy darkness below, baring shining stone arouhat reflected the lightning in foggy fractals.

  When the mudslide had died to a trickle, and the dragonfire had all been carried off, a cold wind blew the st bit of steam away, revealing a gaping night-bck archway in the cliff face.

  Imagine yuild is fighting some massive battle and one of your Dragonriders fucks off to "flirt". ime, a long buried yer of Arthel is peeled back to reveal... something. episode, The Cave.