“Always remember this: every character on Gamearth was created by the Outsiders. We exist solely for the amusement of those who Play our world. Our ambitions, our concerns mean nothing—everything is determined by the roll of the dice.”
—The Book of Rules
***
Prologue
Melanie blew warm breath against the map of Gamearth, trying to make the paint dry faster. She didn’t want the other players to see what she had changed. David would probably call it cheating—but their game would keep playing itself, no matter what they did.
Melanie wanted to win.
A shoebox of acrylic paints lay on the card table in the study. Some of the colors had dried up, with lids cemented by hardened paint. But the bottle of deep forest green had some sluggish drops left at the bottom.
The map’s hexagons of terrain were bright and vivid colors, like some lost Arabian mosaic. They represented mountains, forests, seas, deserts. Melanie pulled a strand of long brown hair behind her left ear and blew again on the wet paint. She looked at where the mysterious “Rulewoman” supposedly lived on the map, in one of the forest-terrain hexes deep in the south. The complexity, the patterns of the map were dizzying.
Gamearth—they had created it as a fantasy world setting for a role-playing game, she and Tyrone, Scott, and David. The four of them played there, embarking on imaginary adventures into imaginary lands every Sunday night for the past two years.
Melanie had painted the map herself, acrylics on a smooth sheet of wood, using rulers and protractors to lay down the precise grid of hex-lines between sections of terrain. No store-bought map kit would do for their world—it had to be something personal, something she created herself. Gamearth needed to be different from all the other worlds available in simple boxed adventures.
Melanie and the others put a great deal of themselves into Gamearth. Perhaps too much.
But times changed, and the Game went on and on. One entire race of characters, the Sorcerers, departed from the world in a magical Transition that turned all of them into six powerful Spirits: three white Earthspirits and three black Deathspirits.
David wanted to end the Game there. He said it wasn’t fun anymore. But Melanie and the others outvoted David, and so they kept playing. David could not leave them. The Game had too much of a hold on all of them. Instead, he made an attempt to destroy the world, but he had been thwarted.
Now, though, David had finally made up his mind—if the others would not let him quit, then he would create a new monster, Scartaris, to devastate the entire map and suck every spark of life dry.
That would end the Game once and for all.
But Melanie planned on stopping him. They both had to play by the rules—but rules could be advantageous, especially if you bent them a little …
Melanie carried the altered map out of her father’s study. She could hardly tell where she had repainted the one hexagon. They would not notice, since she had not changed the terrain type, in which case she could argue—as Scott would—that she hadn’t changed anything relevant anyway. But she had placed something there, under the paint, into the world of Gamearth.
She didn’t know if it would work, if her world could ever have any true connection with the characters inside Gamearth. But this had to be the way, if anything. It had to be.
Somehow during their last gaming session she managed to communicate to her characters about the growing threat of Scartaris in David’s designated section of the map. Her three characters, Delrael the fighter, his scholarly cousin Vailret, and the half-Sorcerer Bryl, had tried to protect their land from Scartaris by creating a giant barrier river that severed the eastern half of the map from the rest.
But now she knew, as did her characters, that the Barrier River would not stop David’s creature. It would only trap half the inhabitants of Gamearth on the wrong side—with the growing threat of Scartaris.
She stared at the blue line of hexagons that indicated the river slicing down the map. It still gave her shivers to think about it. Gamearth showed its own power the previous week, during their last gaming session.
This had become much more than a game to all of them.
In their imaginary adventure, the new river came surging through a channel from the Northern Sea to pour across the plains—and as the four players watched, Melanie’s painted map reflected the change all by itself. Hexagons of forest, grassland, and swamp terrain turned blue, right in front of their eyes. Scott, the “rational” one, had been amazed and terrified, unable to hint at an explanation.
But Melanie knew the explanation. It was so simple. After being steeped in the gaming fantasy as dictated by the rules, Gamearth had developed its own magic.
And Gamearth was not going to accept its destruction without a fight.
If she could do anything to help, even if it meant stretching the rules a bit behind the other players’ backs, then Melanie felt obligated to do so. After all, not many people ever had the opportunity to save a world, not even an imaginary one.
Satisfied that the new paint had dried, Melanie carried the map board out to the kitchen and started to prepare herself for the Game. The future of her world would be in the roll of the dice.
***