Forsaken Read online

  Forsaken

  Mountain King Saga Book 1

  Cebelius

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. It's Just a Game

  2. The Celestial Court

  3. She Who Offers Sorrow

  4. Love by Proxy

  5. The Game of Life

  6. Dungeon Afterparty

  7. I'm Not Locked In Here With You

  8. The Bergsrå

  9. The Great Stair

  10. Persistent World

  11. The Broodmother

  12. From One, Many

  13. Bad Blood

  14. How to Suck at Sidequests

  15. The Road Not Taken

  16. Hard Light

  17. Every Bit As Good

  18. Catch Me If You Can

  19. Across a Ragged Tongue

  20. Power in All But Name

  21. Highly Sought

  22. Sidastrgeil

  23. It's Off To Work We Go

  24. With or Without You

  25. Crazy, Mad, Insane

  26. Evil Wizard's First Rule

  27. That Which Gives Us Mor

  28. The End of the Beginning, or

  29. Council of Elders

  Afterword

  Prologue

  Abram grabbed a cherry soda from the mini-fridge under his desk and popped the top as he looked down at the box.

  Four monitors were mounted to the wall in front of him, and racks stood to either side of his desk, housing his private servers and the lab he used to test solutions before pushing them out to clients.

  As an independent consultant for a variety of firms, Abram did everything from penetration testing to load-balancing work. The only thing he didn't do was leave his apartment.

  Ever.

  At least, not physically. His agoraphobia made going outside a complete non-starter.

  Thank god for video games.

  Abram played religiously, but this latest game promised to be something new, something unique. He'd been following the advances in virtual for years, had even kickstarted more than a few projects — most of which either hadn't gone anywhere or wound up falling far short of their promises.

  This project though, had come out of nowhere. He'd been given a personal link invitation from a friend, and it had taken him to a site that swore up and down the game on offer would be the last one he'd ever play.

  All of the promotional material had been dark too, perfectly in sync with the deliberately creepy vibe, though the premise didn't exactly scream horror. Just dark.

  And erotic.

  Adult projects had been gaining steam lately, and Abram had a desperate need for that sort of distraction.

  Thinking about his absolute failure to attract a woman only drew his attention back to the box on his desk.

  It wasn't what he'd expected. When someone promises a virtual reality experience beyond anything currently available, one does not expect the box it comes in to be six by three by four inches and weigh less than a pound unless the one making the promises is a drug dealer.

  The box didn't have any drugs, unless one counted the desiccant packet. It did have a set of shades. Granted, they looked pretty high tech, with earbuds and a series of small nodules that must serve as controls, but how was he supposed to input anything? Where were the feedback systems?

  He searched the box, but there were no instructions, not even a quick-start sheet. As he examined the shades, the only thing recognizable on the frame was the universal power symbol on one of the nodules. He pressed it, and the symbol illuminated with a pleasant blue glow.

  Shrugging, he waited to see if his machine's bluetooth would pick up the new equipment as he snagged his universal remote off its charger and shut off the lights in his apartment.

  He turned back to his desk only to see that his monitors had all shut down. The only sources of light were the blinking indicators on his equipment, and a gentle glow from the inner surfaces of the shades.

  He picked up the eyewear and slipped them onto his face.

  The light was meaningless though. It was the sort of illumination one got from a tv that's on, but not displaying anything. Just a sort of black ... light.

  Abram felt a sense of warmth from the nodules that had slipped into his ears, and had just enough time to wonder if his brain was about to be cooked by some sort of crazy microwave deathtrap like what happened in one of the anime he'd seen when the darklight abruptly resolved.

  When it did, he felt as though he were somewhere else. His awareness of his apartment; the cool draft of his air conditioner; the quiet, comforting hum of his equipment; even the lingering taste of cherry on his tongue ... all vanished.

  1

  It's Just a Game

  Abram startled awake and stared at the ceiling above him. It was pitch-black in the cave, just as it had always been, but he could see. He had been able to see since the first time she had come to him.

  His arrival here was still a whirl of chaos in his mind. He had been blind, and it all blended together into a nightmare. Terrifying noises, running, tripping, falling. He was caught, beaten, dragged ... all in the dark. The feel of the hands of his captors were rough and calloused. They had brought him to the table, chained him down.

  Substance had been stuffed down his throat, and he only knew it was food because it had been ages, and he wasn't dead yet. The taste was beyond bad. He had thrown up many times ... they just kept stuffing it down his throat until he was too weak to puke, until his gag reflex failed.

  All in the dark. The entire nightmare had played out as sound and sensation with nothing to see. Nothing at all.

  He had come to cherish the fact that he couldn't see. His imagination failed to supply him with horror beyond what he already experienced, so he took solace from the black. It felt close, cool, comforting. Only the dark did not abuse him.

  Then she had come. He had felt her caress, sensual and light, and his body had responded. She had mounted him there on the stone table, and after a wash of pleasure he had gained the ability to see in the dark.

  When that happened, the last veil hiding him from the horrors of his position was lost.

  She was a goblin, or had been.

  The first time she came to him, she had been no more than three-and-a-half feet high. The next time, she was much taller. He did not know how he recognized her, but he did. It was instinct. It was the same girl. No, the same creature. The same monster. She had changed, grown stronger, but it was her.

  His dark sight only gave him shades of light and dark, and it wasn't like anything he knew of. There was no light here, and at length he guessed that the gradations of light and dark had something to do with distance, because it wasn't like any kind of infrared that he'd ever seen either. It was like an artist had shaded a composition, but never colored it. The problem was the 'light source' for the shading was him. He saw everything as though shining a flashlight directly at it.

  He'd taken to keeping his eyes closed. The goblins did not speak around him, and only she did more than feed him.

  In those first days — days he had come to measure by the time between feedings — he tried to speak to them, but every time he opened his mouth to do more than accept whatever foul shit they fed him he was beaten. He quickly learned to keep his mouth shut. Once, he moaned when she made him cum. She hit him so hard that he blacked out.

  So he learned not to speak. He made no noise, and kept his eyes closed as he waited for death.

  In all that time, she never even gave him her name.

  He knew death was coming. He could feel it. His body was wasting away.

  She came to him at intervals, and only before her visits did they bother to clean the filth from the table around his legs. There were no days or nights, no weeks or months
. He was never let loose, never unchained. Open sores lined the manacles, and he'd long since come to accept the constant pain as proof only that he wasn't dead yet, but that he was getting closer.

  Every time he woke, he sighed, because being awake meant the nightmare wasn't over. His fear died along with his hope, and he simply existed, there in the dark. There was literally nothing to hold on to save the expectation of a death that always seemed right around the corner.

  Then, at last, he heard something new. Something that dragged his addled mind out of the haze in which he existed and focused his attention.

  He heard the clash of arms, the screams of dying goblins.

  "Search down that way, we cannot afford to miss the stairs!"

  It was a man's voice. He sounded Russian. Abram's heart stirred, though at first he couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes. He had so embraced the idea of dying in this place that the idea he might be rescued didn’t even occur to him.

  It had been five feedings since the last time she had come to him, and she was not due back for another twenty or so. Her appearances had become his calendar, though he had long since forgotten how many times she had come to him and taken his seed.

  It was obvious to him that's what she was doing. She never spoke to him, and though she touched him gently she only did so in ways calculated to arouse him, even going so far as to violate his ass to massage his prostate if he proved too weak to otherwise manage an erection. He didn't know what it was for. She never seemed to get pregnant.

  The sound of bare feet on stone brought him back to himself, and he bothered to open his eyes because he knew that goblins had a shorter gait. Their steps were more lively, quicker.

  What he saw at the entrance to the relatively small room they kept him in was no goblin.

  That did not mean it wasn't a monster.

  Snakes writhed around her head. Wings draped her shoulders like a faux cloak. Her face was a mask of shadow that even his strange dark sight could not penetrate.

  "Anything down there?!" the masculine voice yelled, and finally, Abram realized he was saved. The man's voice was distant, but he was definitely talking to the monster in front of him. They would free him, whoever they were. He would be taken from this place.

  A youthful, feminine voice answered, and he could tell it was coming from the blank-faced monster in front of him. "Nothing we need, and no way up!"

  "Get back here then," the man shouted, and the clash and cry of battle picked up once more. "We need you!"

  The creature hesitated a moment, then reached up and plucked something from the wall outside the room they were keeping him in. She stepped up to him, revealed what she had to be a key, and freed his right hand before placing the key in it as she said, "I will not allow you to distract us from our purpose ... but my master would not want you left here. This is my compromise. Make your own way, hero ... or die trying."

  Then she turned and left without a backward glance.

  Abram flexed muscle wasted from disuse as he lifted the iron key, staring at it stupidly for a long moment in silence before he twisted. Every part of his body hurt to move. It would be easier to stay still, but he had been still for too long, waiting for death. If death would not come to him, he would go to it.

  He freed the shackle on his left hand and sat up, ignoring both the pain and the gooey filth that coated his lower half as he unlocked each leg in turn.

  He slid off the slab on which he'd lain for God alone knew how long, and stood. He fully expected his legs to fail, but they did not. He had lost almost all his weight. Once, in the before time, he had been what Cartman would have called 'big-boned,' and the rest of the world called fat.

  All that was gone now.

  Abram was practically a revenant, a barely physical shade of his former self. Despite this and to his great surprise, he could move. It hurt, but he could do it. Some part of him acknowledged the unreality of all this. There was no possible way he was not crippled for having been chained to the table for an eternity, but somehow, he could move.

  Of course I can move, he realized abruptly as the memories came flooding back: his room, the shades, the game. It was almost as though a yawning void inside his psyche was being filled with a reason: his reason. Where before there was nothing, now, memories flooded in.

  I'm playing the game!

  As he stood there in front of the stone table, considering himself, a fire began to burn in the depths of his soul.

  I can catch them. They might still take me with them if they know I can move.

  He looked at his hands, but had no idea how he was controlling the system. He made a few gestures to try summoning a Heads-Up Display, or a menu, but nothing appeared.

  I suppose I don't get my HUD until I'm out of the opening segment, he mused. He'd played plenty of games that were like that, and put it from his mind as he concentrated on moving his aching limbs.

  Abram was used to beginning a game weak and with almost no gear, but starting one barely able to stand, naked, and covered in his own filth was a first.

  He stepped from the room and almost ran into a goblin.

  Unalloyed rage flared, and without thinking his left hand whipped out. He caught the little beast by the back of the head and held it still just long enough to jam the key into its eye and twist, his lips curled in a hateful, feral snarl.

  The body convulsed, then fell limp. The little thing hadn't even had time to scream. He did not have the strength to support it, and it collapsed, pulling the key from his hand.

  Staring stupidly at the corpse, his body shuddered, and only after a long moment did he recognize his shivering as all that was left of his laughter. He was laughing, but he didn't make a sound. He didn't dare. Where there was one goblin, there were likely more close by.

  My first kill.

  He slowly, painfully knelt, and searched it. He found a club, but it was too heavy for him in his weakened state to lift. There was also a rusty dagger and this he took.

  As he was searching the goblin his hair fell around and over the corpse. It was long, far longer than he'd ever worn it, and was a useless, matted tangle that wafted a dire stench into his nostrils.

  He pulled the mass of it around his shoulder and with his newly acquired dagger sawed the bulk of it off, leaving it roughly shoulder-length. It was still filthy, but at least now it couldn't trip him up or get in his way. He also pulled the key back out of the eye socket. It squelched as he did so. He shook it to fling most of the goop off, then left the body behind as he made his way down the corridor.

  It split. Abram glanced left, then right. Bodies littered the corridor, but most of them weren't goblins. They were bigger, broader, and better armored.

  Hobgoblins, he realized. I must be in some kind of fortress.

  It was obvious which way the adventurers had gone by how the bodies were sprawled, and Abram turned to follow. Somewhere up ahead he heard someone scream, "Now!" followed by the grating of stone.

  A few moments later, he reached a narrow stair surrounded by stone statues. The stair led up to a blank stone block. He knew at a glance there was no way in hell he could move it.

  I guess I don't get to catch up. Rude.

  Not only could he not catch up, but the stone statues were packed so thickly in the corridor that he couldn't get through them. Were he not practically crippled from the pre-game imprisonment, he could have climbed through them, but at this point he just didn't have the strength.

  That's one way to limit the sandbox. Back the other way it is then.

  Abram turned around and began walking. After a few moments, it occurred to him that all these dead hobgoblins laying around might have gear he could use, but after searching a few he discovered — to his increasing annoyance — that the weapons and armor were either far too big to fit him, or far too heavy to lift.

  Unlike any other game he'd ever played, neither the hobgoblins nor the occasional goblin corpse he found were carrying any money, of any kind. Also no
healing potions, or bandages ... or really anything he could use.

  The only thing he did manage to do was clean most of the filth off his legs using a pair of gambesons.

  Man, they weren't kidding. This shit really IS dark.

  He tried to laugh at his own joke, but his voice was little more than a husk of itself. The few noises he managed to make sounded horrible and abused, like something he'd hear from the resident of a padded cell.

  The sound sent tremors through him, as though it spoke to deeper truths than he wanted to explore. He glanced around, but there was no one ... at least no one alive, anywhere in sight.

  There was no one here to rely on but him. He tightened his hold on the dagger and lifted it, considering its ragged edge as he made the decision then and there that he would not be captured again. If it looked as though he would be overwhelmed, he would end it himself.

  Escape or die. Standard RPG opener. Play the game. That's it, Abram. As impossibly immersive as this is, it's still just a game. All the memories up to now were just the loading screen, the opening montage. Probably necessary fluff while the files downloaded into my server. This program is unbelievable. I've never heard of anything this advanced ... but it's STILL just a game.

  He hesitated a moment longer, then nodded to himself, resolved to his course.

  NOW play begins. Live or die.

  Abram swapped the key and the dagger, putting the key in his left hand, the dagger in his strong right. Then with his knuckles brushing the wall he made his slow way forward.