Chapter 41: Agarthea, the Floating Isle

Our generic, brown mesa strider was taking the air in huge gulps of its wings, working in tandem with the filigree-laced balloons. Made of some gossamer thin fabric, each boulder-sized balloon was a slightly different faded color. I knew the bird was only behaving according to its programming, but it struggled to gain altitude.

Agarthea—our floating island destination—was still only a small blotch, faintly visible through the sparse clouds lingering above the Crescent Mountains’ tallest point; Blade Peak.

“Does it seem to you that our winged friend is having a hard time of it?” I asked, noticing Azwold tinkering with something. His [Tomb Cloak] was off and he was fiddling with clinky, metallic objects beneath its folds.

“Hmm?” he glanced up, too focused on his project to hear me.

“I said this bird looks stressed. We will make it there in one piece, correct?”

“Ah,” he said, cranking a tool to tighten a nut. “Um. Here’s the thing, Eld: the area we’re going to isn’t even ready yet. That’s why the balloon ride is so overpriced. That’s why the mobs are so high you can’t even read their levels. Any monster up there can sniff players out in minutes and make short work of us. Or so I’m told.”

“What do you mean ‘not ready yet?’”

“Still being constructed,” he frowned, scanning the busy swirling patterns of the basket’s carpeting for a dropped screw or wiring bit. “But they don’t really have to tell people not to go there. Nobody except the tippity top show offs even bother. Gold doesn’t grow on trees,” he paused to think. “Although I heard tale of a golden-barked tree way off somewhere in Animun lands. There’s a lot more stuff coming down the pipeline. Always new things to put into RoL. It’s part of what I love about the game. Can’t let one stupid guild ruin it all, you know?”

“What is it you are crafting there?” I asked, realizing that the progress bar on his work was crawling.

“Augmenting the [Tomb Cloak] to double as a parachute cloak,” he said, eyeballing my purple coat. “Every Gadget Crafter should have one, IMO, but I was kinda waiting till I got something better. I still think you need more protection than I do, or else I’d just take my Grim Dim back. You’re welcome.”

“I cannot imagine wearing anything else.”

“Anyway, I’m not trying to rely on your levitate spell whenever we need to defy gravity. Seeing as how we’re on our way to an island in the sky and have this whole long ride to get there, I figured now was as good a time as any.”

I moved to the basket’s edge, gripping the leathery rail pad. Below and to my left, obscured by the haze of dust, was Alkali Hollow. I took time to soak in this unique vista. Realms of Lore truly was wonder-filled. I had no misconceptions why Azwold and DarkNeon, Relja and Vick5, Berem and Medett, cared so much. Everyone who played the game cared a great deal about its continued health. As did I.

And then a thought struck me, as if the ghostly mouse scurrying though my dark mental alleyways for moldy morsels had just morphed into a giant rat...

If Telemoon’s experimentations were the reason for my presence in game, what happens to me if we end them once and for all? Will I meet my end, too?

The thought was chilling, and as I gripped the rails, my head swam. I gazed at the blurring distances all around me.

“Careful now,” said the Mage, grabbing onto my coat tails. “Don’t tell me you get air sick? Is that a thing?”

“It is nothing,” I said, re-composing myself. “Only the ever-present existential quandaries of un-death.”

“Mmm,” he grunted a casual understanding. “Speaking of existential crises… the monsters. Up there? In under-construction zones, they usually put up barriers to keep the nosy and overly intrepid from sneaking a peek at unreleased content. These monsters are the wall. Nobody can get past them no matter if they’re max level, which right now is 50. They’re probably gonna raise the level cap next expansion. Can’t wait for that. But these islands, they don’t even have an ETA slated. It’s some future stuff.”

“I see,” I said, marveling at how far my game jargon comprehension had come.

His parachute cloak’s progress bar was halfway filled. Still tinkering away, he asked, “How long is the cooldown on [Spell: Levitate]?”

“One hour.”

“Oy, you’ll be cutting it super close.”

I glanced at the time. The day/night cycle moved double-time compared to out-of-game, but hours passed by the same. I might find this confusing if it were not my constant experience. “All I need is perhaps fifteen minutes on the island,” I said. “Then we descend.”

Azwold laughed at that, but I did not see the humor.

“I don’t think you get it,” he said. “If one of the mobs kills us, it could corpse camp. We’ll be stuck there, maybe till after the maintenance completes, maybe much longer. I have no idea what the graveyard layout is up there, or if there even are any yet. Not only that,” he pointed a tarnished wrench at me, “but we need to get to Hourglass Sandfall before the server goes down so we can figure out what to do with you. Aren’t you worried?”

“I exist in what one might consider a perpetual state of concern, so yes.”

“Because, to be perfectly honest with you, without the [Hive Scepter] and my poor sweet baby, I don’t have anywhere I feel safe stashing you till the servers are back up. I don’t even know if hiding out in the Gremlin would save you.”

“One thing I have seen proof of; Telemoon does not allow valuable assets to fall out of their possession.”

“You think they see you as an asset?” he asked.

I nodded, not wanting to tell him of the fae creature’s strange warnings. Not until I understood better.

“That’s a cold comfort, my friend.”

“A comfort of any temperature is preferable to none at all.”

“Mhm,” he said. “Almost there.”

I gazed out and saw the island was still far off, then realized he meant his crafting project. The progress bar was creeping toward completion.

“That oughta do it,” he said with a flourish of his wrench. He tossed it gently up and it dematerialized back into his inventory. “Voila. Well, kinda voila. Can’t really demonstrate it here in the balloon basket.”

“Soon enough, I imagine,” I said.

[Attention Realms of Lore denizens. The server will shut down for emergency maintenance in approximately 1.5hrs. Please plan accordingly. We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you.]

As if spurred to action by this, our brown mesa strider squawked and redoubled its flapping efforts.

Far off to the north, I could almost make out the dark edifices of the Nevahjian Enclave. Like a shadowy mirage, it loomed in a shroud of dusk and dust, though it was not dusk in game; the darkness that clung to the black city was magical in nature.

There was something alluring about Nevahj, something enigmatic.

“How do you feel about that city?” I pointed.

Azwold made an ambiguous gesture. “Only Shadow Mages go there. It’s kinda their thing to be mysterious and spooky, even more so than Spirit Mages. At least that’s what they think.”

We had gone there once with Relja; to the ‘front porch’ area. Medett had created a quest to acquire berries. I was eager to question them further about it, and I grew more deeply concerned with the fact that none of our party members had logged back on yet.

“Do you think something is preventing our comrades from entering the game?” I asked.

“I’ve been wondering that myself. Maybe with the emergency maintenance coming up, they’re blocking log ins. It’s a rare measure, but I think it’s happened a few times in the past.”

“Azwold,” I said, “what if the balloon drops us off somewhere inaccessible on that island? Somewhere in the middle of it?”

“You sure are inquisitive today,” he said. “It’d be nice if you’d ask me some questions I know the answer to.”

“As a summoner class it must be aggravating to have so little control.”

“Don’t try to psychoanalyze me,” he looked away, out over the distances. “Not until you figure yourself out alright.”

“Aye. Fair.”

We traveled without speaking for a time after that, floating ever higher to the island in the sky.

Agarthea loomed larger by the moment and soon it was possible to discern details of its underside, like a great, upside-down mountain of earth and mud and boulders. A persistent mist floated across our path in the air. There were dozens of visible waterfalls draining from the island’s cliffy rims and out from its underground streams and caverns. I imagined they gradually transformed from mighty rivers and trickling creeks into more vaporous forms. But the wind guaranteed the water had no hope of touching the desert below in anything resembling a waterfall.

Cap’n Flappy—as the Mage had nicknamed our mesa strider—alighted onto a barren patch of sun-cracked mud, nary a balloon basket’s width from the flying island’s edge.

Hesitant, we made our exit, climbing up and over the basket’s rim. I clattered to the ground and as I righted myself, I turned to see the balloon and ‘Cap’n Flappy’ dithering the briefest of moments before making a hasty departure.

“You’d think for the price they could at least make it a round-trip ticket,” Azwold groused. “This is ridiculous, really. All this trouble just to take a flying leap. I wonder sometimes if the game developers make stuff take longer on purpose just to keep people logged in.”

“But once we visit Hourglass Sandfall ‘on foot,’ then we can return in a quicker fashion in the future. Is that not what you said?”

“Yep,” he said, staring inland.

Then I beheld a sight that could steal one’s breath away. A prehistoric landscape rolled away from us toward a distant, and apparently active volcano. There were ferns taller than houses, spindly trees rising a hundred, two hundred feet with scaly bark like unopened pine cones. Fronds and spines and mosses of descriptions I recalled in school book illustrations.

The flora was dramatically oversized and thoughts of Cambrian explosions, or Permian Eras, or Carboniferous-ness drifted to my mind from the world outside. This begged questions about the zone’s fauna; Azwold’s mentioned monsters. If Agarthea was like eras ending in ‘zoic’ or ‘ian’ or ‘assic,’ it would teem with beasts the size of buildings.

“Looks like they’re planning a Dinoland expansion,” Azwold whistled soft amazement to himself.

Knowing that the Mage was a ‘coffee go-getter,’ as Ursamigo put it, I held my tongue-less quips that wanted to roll from my jaw. No need to embarrass him.

“Lo,” I said, gesturing to a heap laying near a patch of tall grasses some way off. “It appears one of your ‘tippy top show offs’ has made their way to the floating isle.”

“Could be,” he said, retrieving his binoculars. “But it also looks like they met the fate we want to avoid. Oh. That ain’t good...”

“What?”

“We’re not gonna be able to complete Medett’s quest. That’s Berem.”

I tilted my skull quizzically.

“He’s objectively more powerful than you and I. Named NPCs like Berem can usually fend off a full max level party. Solo. If he’s down, we have no chance.”

“But how in the Realm did he get here?” I said. “You have not built him a range extender.”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he shrugged. “I bet the server reset will respawn him back with his sister.”

“He is like I,” I said. “If you are afraid of what might befall me sans server stability, we should worry about Berem as well.”

He scowled at me for several moments, glanced at the time on his tablet. “Fine. But be ready to run. Like, run run.”

I nodded.

We spanned the distance, creeping forward in silence. I possessed no adrenaline gland, but I experienced something akin to a heightened awareness caused by knowledge of danger.

A terrible beast of unknown variety howled some distance into the jungle; like an elephant, alligator, and hyena screaming in discordant unison. Several other creatures answered the predatorial challenge with similarly chimeric calls.

Azwold paused, looked back at the island’s precipice from whence we had crept, then continued on just as slowly.

We knelt to inspect the Beast Ranger. After only a moment, we knew we were not looking at a corpse. His life bar was full and green.

“Berem?” Azwold whispered-yelled.

An eye squinted open, rolling back at a strange angle to see us without moving. “Best take off,” he said. “It’ll smell you.”

“What in the Realms are you doing up here?” Azwold said, stunned.

“Heard about epic dino loot,” he said. “Couldn’t resist.”

“How?” I asked.

“Simple,” he whispered. “The central point of my roaming range isn’t the orchard. It’s in the Crescent Valley.”

“Should have guessed that,” said Azwold. “But still! If I build you a range extender, you’ll be able to prowl straight to outer space!”

“You could do that?!” he coughed. “Er, I mean. Quiet! Can’t you see I’m playing dead here?”

The wails of a carnivore set my spine to quivering. Its thunderous footfalls were audible now.

“Shouldn’t have got loud,” said Berem. “Better skedaddle.”

“Yes,” Azwold nodded. “Right. You have the [Eld Molar], correct? Slide it our way real quick and we’ll be gone.”

“Can’t,” said Berem, still lying on a fat tuffet of something presaging lichen. “I know I said I’d try not to make it into bone jewelry, but… Vish is wearing it.”

“Where is Vish now?” I asked.

“I’ve been hunting this thing for a couple of days now,” said Berem. “He’s tough, but I think I’ve got his health bar down some 20%. Got him tagged real good. Just gotta keep chipping away. I have a solid ability rotation going. Don’t worry. I’ll get him. And when I do...”

“Where’s Vish?” Azwold asked again.

“In its belly.”

My jaw dropped.

“My quest item is in the belly of a stupidly high level mob?” Azwold facepalmed. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“Yeah,” Berem snorted. “Don’t worry. Vish will be fine once I tear open the monster. I can heal him. Um, you better run, like I said. Don’t mess up my progress by accidentally resetting him.”

“Yes. Come on, Eld,” said Azwold, walking back.

“What about the server reset?” I asked, staring to backpedal as well.

“I’ll be fine. Worst case is I won’t be trapped in a video game anymore, right?” Berem turned his head to offer me a slight smile. “Now go on, get!”

I nodded, running my jangle-bone jog to catch pace with the Mage. I realized it was not just my running that jangled, the creature’s stomping was shaking the entire island, or so it seemed to me.

In a spike of unreasonable anxiety, I turned to look. Then I looked back to the edge of the island and open sky, wishing that someone had given me a speed boost potion instead of anything else.

Even at a sizable distance, I could see the thing’s fangs were as long as swords. No predator more ‘apex’ could wriggle its way into my thoughts. Covered in spiny, feather-like plumage, and thick hide like a brick elephant, the carnivore rushed by Berem as if he were not there... like a giant dog chasing after a bone: me.

A wail escaped my non-throat and my waxwork was ablaze with chaotic thrumming of tiny wings.

“Get ready,” Azwold yelled as we approached where the balloon had landed. He grasped my arm as if he were the one with [Spell: Clutches of Death], and we leapt from the edge. A tiny landslide of crusty dirt and pebbles rained down below foot.

The creature’s last howl shrunk away above us as we tumbled, falling to earth.