Music swelled inside Roark’s head, a deep, driving song of warfare. The endless black void of death receded, shedding light on two winged figures: One with midnight skin and leathery wings wielding a glowing purple scythe with a blade longer than its wingspan. The other with fiery golden flesh and wings radiating white light, brandishing a flaming longsword twice its height. The creatures whirled and slashed and danced across the sky, locked in an endless battle above the magma-filled cone of a massive volcano.

“Long ago,” a deep, rasping voice began, “the war between the infernali and the malaika destroyed our world.”

Slowly the pair of creatures grew smaller and Roark realized with a start that he was moving away from their combat-dance, gaining a wider vantage point. He was flying, though he had no proper body. The land stretched out below the volcano was crisscrossed with streams of lava and filled with hundreds of thousands of the winged creatures, both light and dark—some wielding glowing or flaming weapons, others throwing elemental attacks, and still others leading charges with armies of strange chimeras. The noise and chaos of large-scale battle rang in his ears. The smell of fire and slag and death burned in his nostrils.

Then it all faded away.

“While the younger races—humans, elves, and rogs—chose their sides …”

Light exploded, shining down on a human in obsidian plate armor and a taller, willowier humanoid creature with azure skin and pointed ears—an elf, he suspected. The pair of them knelt before one of the winged demons. Without warning, the vision receded and vanished, giving way to an identical scene of a female elf and a muscular green-skinned humanoid with intricately carved tusks and gleaming, boxy armor—the rog?—kneeling in the brilliant glare of the winged angel.

“… and accepted their divine and infernal magics …”

By some enchantment, Roark saw the two scenes playing out at the same time now, side by side. As one, the demon and angel reached down, touching the beings pledging their service. Bright white light and deepest shadow flared and consumed the images. When his vision returned, Roark watched as side by side, but in entirely different places, the human and rog stood. Each stared down into an upturned palm. One held a shifting ball of oily purple-black light. The other a ball of snowy blue-white power, raw and beautiful.

“We olms hid away in our mountains,” the rasping voice said, “trusting our intellect and cleverness to protect us while we waited for the war to end and peace to fall once again.”

Roark watched as a group of what looked like upright aquatic salamanders filed into the darkness of a mountain cave, paddle-like tails hanging from the bottom of their flowing robes. Only one stopped and turned his round slime-coated head back to look over his shoulder at the surface world he was leaving behind. This salamander-man closed his blue eyes sadly and followed his kin into the depths of the earth.

Then Roark was deep in the darkness of a cave where the salamander-people—olms, he reminded himself—stood around a glowing green table, arcane symbols etched into its granite surface. They wore ornate circlets fitted with gemstones, leaned on elaborately carved staves, and held thin pen-like sticks in hand. These sticks they waved over flasks that flashed bright pink, toxic yellow, or intense blue.

“But in the end, the Hearth tired of waiting for their arrogance and stupidity to cleanse them from her world …”

The battle at the volcano returned, though this time the humans, elves, and rogs had joined the fight. As the infernali and malaika hacked and slashed their way across the sky, the landbound armies cut one another down and incinerated each other on the lava-crossed field of combat below, battling the armies of strange chimeras as they went.

Suddenly, a deep thundering reverberated across the battlefield, and the armies on the ground were shaken from their feet. Smoke billowed from the volcano’s cone, quickly followed by chunks of porous rock and gouts of lava. The burning slag pummeled the winged infernali and malaika like a sentient rain, glomming onto their flesh and burning them out of the sky.

“However, she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—cleanse the scars their fighting left behind.”

Roark found himself looking out across the wreckage of a once-handsome citadel much like the one he’d just died in, but fresh, with the ruined bodies of combatants strewn across the rubble.

“… or the misbegotten creatures they created in their pursuit of victory and domination. Some say she left them as a reminder of the price of arrogance.”

An enormous golden boar the size of a house, with flaming ivory tusks barreled through a village, smashing homes and businesses while townspeople ran screaming from the destruction. All around, smaller blue-skinned Changelings pillaged dwellings and ripped into panicking cattle with their black claws and serrated teeth.

“Now, great heroes among the younger races fight the unnatural abominations the infernali and malaika left behind.”

A party of warriors stood on a wide plain. An azure-skinned elf in shining plate mail, a coppery-haired woman in a dark hood and black leathers, and a pale-skinned elf in purple robes looked on while one of the green-skinned rogs inspected a heavy set of tracks in the grass. The rog’s topknot shifted in the breeze as he stood and pointed at the columned ruins of a temple ahead.

Some great predator roared, and the scene shifted to an underground lair, where the same party attacked a huge leathery behemoth with gray skin and stringy white hair. It hurled blasts of infernal energy at them while cutting and hewing with the same glowing, long-bladed scythe the winged infernali had wielded in the war. The rog and the dark elf in the shining plate mail ran in, one from each side, swinging a thin, elegant blade and a thick, cleaving longsword. Each time the warriors sustained an injury, the purple-robed elf waved her hands in an arcane pattern—another form of the mysterious air-writing? Roark wondered—and a bloody purple nimbus would surround them, healing their gashes. The black-clad human disappeared from the fray in a puff of shadow, only to reappear at the creature’s back.

The smoky shadow curling off the human’s form brought to Roark’s mind the patch of darkness which had shot him from the citadel wall. Devious. He couldn’t fault the assassin’s method—it aligned well with his personal policy of stealthy victory over forthright defeat—but he did long to appear behind her and sink his Lyuko dagger into her kidneys.

In a flash of rapier and dagger, the assassin scored the behemoth’s hide, then disappeared again. The behemoth roared, sweeping the scythe toward where she had been—but far too late. The rog adopted a martial pose, slim blade pointed at the behemoth, then cried out, “Stance of the Cleansing Lotus Flame!” The rog lunged, and its blade slashed through the behemoth’s abdomen, orange flames eating away at the creature’s flesh from the wound. With a sssshinggg, the dark elf’s thick longsword sliced through the behemoth’s thick neck, and its head thudded to the stone floor, rolling away.

“And, as always, to the victor go the spoils,” the rasping voice said.

Behemoth dead, the party of warriors sorted through the gold, jewels, and weaponry piled around the underground lair. But when they came to the creature’s infernal scythe, the assassin, dark elf, and rog all turned to the fair elf in the purple robes. One pale hand reached out and grasped its thorny, obsidian handle. Arcs of infernal energy crackled through the air. The elf’s white hair, lilac in this storm of darkness, billowed around her like a corona and her eyes flashed deepest amethyst.

“While the young, childish races seek glory, fame, and power in the extermination of these infernal and divine miscreations, we step out of our caves once more.”

Back at the mountains, an army of olms filed out of the caves, squinting against the setting sun. This time, however, the salamander-people were clad in jangling silver mail set with gemstones. Glinting silver swords hung from their belts, and they carried staves and those slim magical sticks. Roark itched to get his hands on one and study how their magic worked.

“We will bring the chaos under reign once more …”

The image shifted to squads of the olms subduing unruly humans and elves and leading a top-knotted rog to a headman, ax raised and ready. Next, a small envoy of them stood before a king. No words were uttered, but the sovereign slowly left his throne and knelt before the strange lizard folk.

“… and return order to Hearthworld by any means necessary.”

The leader of the olm envoy looked directly into Roark’s eyes, and he realized this was the same salamander who had looked back sadly on the warring world as he left it behind. The salamander’s faded blue eyes flared suddenly with aquamarine light.

“Will you be with us … or against us?”

Blackness faded in until all Roark could see was the glowing blue eyes, then they faded as well.

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Roark flinched away instinctively, expecting a magical attack. Then realizing he had no body in this void, he relaxed and studied the letters more closely. The first line of text disappeared, replaced by a second:

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Then a third: MMORPGAMERS’ CHOICE AWARD 6 years running!

A single, eerie note drifted through the blackness like a feather on the wind, deftly turning into a haunting melody, accompanied by the scent of smoke and molten earth.

HEARTHWORLD

While his mind was still struggling to discern the intentions of these spells, Roark abruptly found himself wandering bodiless through a bustling marketplace. The streets were filled with vendors under colorful canopies, their wooden stalls showcasing weapons, armor, jewelry, gemstones, food, and drinks. Warriors, assassins, sorcerers, and soldiers of every shape, size, and color combination wandered through the market wearing a mishmash of armor, robes, and helms of varied quality and infernal or divine alignment. Rather than attacking one another or the olms walking among them, the people chatted amiably, negotiated with the vendors, and even bartered with one another for more powerful items or items that more closely matched the ones they already wore.

They all seemed sentient and were clearly capable of speech. Interesting.

Fearing that he already knew what the outcome would be, Roark tried to speak, to get the attention of any of these people so that he could demand the answers that the feather-banded Changeling hadn’t been bright enough to supply. But of course, without a body to form the words, the effort was fruitless.

The golden text returned, stretching through the air of the market while warriors, sorcerers, and assassins walked beneath, seemingly unaware.

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As Roark struggled to understand the foreign meanings of so many words he once wielded with ease, a strange feeling of dissolving overtook him. Similar to when he leapt into the portal, but with nowhere near the amount of pain. The writing and market vanished around him, leaving nothing but blackness behind.

And from the blackness came one blood-red word: Respawning …