38

Brother Aurochs delved deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the Halls, and the rest followed behind. Hunter hadn’t had the time or the opportunity to get to know the man. Even if he was still just that–just a man–Hunter hadn’t heard Brother Aurochs speak more than ten words. Still, he had a gentleness to him, an air of stout but warm benevolence. Instead of that, the were-buffalo now radiated a sense of primordial pain and sadness, a longing and a grief that overflowed from his hulking form and spread to everything around him. He clung to his greataxe listlessly and simply put one hoofed foot in front of the other in a pace that was almost glacial.

Right beside him walked Sister Peregrine, only she, too, was almost unrecognizable. The Sister Hunter had met was a creature of grace and pride; the woman before him was but a pale shadow of her. She was broken and beaten in spirit, if not in body, and had barely enough oomph in her to hold up the torch she was carrying. Hunter tried to reach out to her, get her talking, but to no avail. She wasn’t in the mood for conversation–even more so than usually, that is.

The rest of the group were following at a respectful distance, speaking little and only in whispers. Fawkes was lost in thought, her pale and narrow face suddenly looking impossibly older under the shadows cast by the torch she carried. The ravens spent most of their time scouting their surroundings, but even them had stopped their usually constant bickering. Fyodor padded next to Hunter, never straying more than a couple feet away. In a different occasion Hunter might have poked some harmless fun at what a scaredy cat the huge direwolf was proving to be; not at this time though. If anything, he now understood Fyodor’s ever-present angst a little bit better.

As for Hunter himself… well, he wasn’t sure what to think or feel. Elderpyre had long stopped feeling like just another game to him. He couldn’t even remember whether he’d ever been able to tell the game’s virtual world apart from the real one, not even at the very beginning. That’s how gripping its verisimilitude was, how realistic the feel of everything around him. He’d come to terms with that. The people in it, though… the people were another matter entirely. Hunter was starting to realize how real the people were starting to feel, too, and it was kind of disconcerting. With Fawkes, it was more or less to be expected. He’d spent a lot of time with her and they’d been through some traumatic stuff together. Shit, she’d been more real to him than many of the people he knew in his world. You know, real people in the real world. The Brethren, though? He didn’t have the time or the opportunity to connect with them. He liked them well enough, alright, but when it came down to brass tacks, he knew they were just a couple of NPCs, right? A stream of ones and zeroes, no more than facsimiles of real people, convincing but ultimately as two-dimensional as a person-shaped cardboard cutout.

Right?

If that was the case, why was he feeling so damn bad?

Why had he risked going through another excruciating death experience just to pull their chestnuts out of the fire? Why did he get that terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach every time he looked at the now-transformed Brother Aurochs, or the devastated Sister Peregrine? Immersion was the holy grail of every gamer and game designer out there, but this was more than strictly that.

Was everything alright up there in that head of his?

Was he beginning to slip?

Hunter tried to rationalize the whole thing. People had the tendency to an anthropomorphize pretty much everything. Hell, even Tom Hanks had anthropomorphized Wilson in that old Cast Away survival drama, and Wilson was a fucking volleyball with a smiley face painted on. These, on the other hand, were almost indistinguishable from honest-to-god people. Plus, they were characters and situations expertly created and written for the sole purpose of tugging on his heartstrings, of granting an extra layer of emotional authenticity to the whole Elderpyre experience. He was supposed to feel for them, so it was very normal to start kind of caring about them. He wasn’t going nuts or anything.

Right?

“That was one hell of a stupid thing you pulled back there” Fawkes whispered to him, cutting his train of thought short. “Brave, yes, but stupid. What were you thinking?”

“That’s an awful lot of words to just say ‘thank you’”, Hunter said, but his half-hearted attempt at a tease fell flatter than a two-cent pancake.

“I’m not jesting, lad” she said after, hesitating for a couple of breaths in a decidedly non-Fawkeslike manner. “I really wonder what goes on in that thick head of yours. There are things I’d like to talk about when we get out of this old tomb.”

“Yeah, sure. Amen to that.”

“What?”

“I mean, I’m looking forward to it.”

“So am I, lad. So am I.”

Fawkes turned her gaze back to the dark corridors that lay ahead, looking already lost in some somber thought. Hunter, not willing to let the first half-proper conversation they had in hours die out, spoke again.

“So, this friend of yours. You must be really excited to finally find him.”

“I’ll be when I do”, Fawkes said with a sigh.

“What’s he like?”

“Reiner? You’d like him. You’re both a pain in my neck.”

“So he’s not all dark and serious and businesslike? You know, like you?”

Despite herself, that brought a strained smile to the swordwoman’s lips.

“I wish. He talks a lot and laughs a lot and drinks a lot and gets in trouble a lot. But he’s a good friend. One I miss.”

“You’ll see him”, Hunter said in an awkward attempt to lift her spirits. “Real soon.”

“Yes,” said Fawkes, but her voice betrayed her mind had already drifted elsewhere again. “Real soon.”