A Gamer's Guide 359

The garden was on fire. It was very pretty. Purple flames licking at grass and bushes and budding flowers to leave only soot and ashes behind. Even the smoke was purple, rising up into the heavens to join with the clouds. The snow hadn’t even had time to melt before turning into steam and floating away. Snowmen and snow forts and a so-called igloo were all gone. 

“The house too, right? Think of all the bad times and the mean comments!” 

Down below, far, far down below, the fire was anyways beginning to spread from the ruined flowerbeds to the foundations of the church. “Okay,” Lett said. He looked at his window. It felt odd to see it from the outside in. Even when he had been flying around and playing with Desput, he hadn’t been this high up. His mount, his seat, his throne as Desput had called it, was larger than the church. Its head was big enough to allow both Lett and Desput to sit cross-legged, quite far apart, with a picnic cloth laid between and below them to shield from the coldness of his mount’s skin. Around its head, around them, circling them like the bars of a cage, were five horns. Lett returned his gaze to the cackling, floating visage of his new-old master. “But… there’s a book in my room I was to keep.”

“Really?” Desput flipped around and upside down, and for a moment, Lett couldn’t tell whether he was grinning or frowning. “But they’ll be here in only a few minutes. You said it would be more dramatic to leave the village unburnt, so now they’ll come here fast!”

“The book,” Lett repeated, but he didn’t know what to say afterwards.

Desput flipped back around. Now Lett knew he was grinning and nothing else. “Well, why not? That’s what friends do for friends, right? Yeah!” Bouncing across the immense, cliff-sized face of the mount, Desput stopped only once he arrived at one of the boulder-sized eyeballs. He grabbed its eyelids and stretched them open, forcing the half-lidded eyes to be revealed in their full, purple glory. “Knock knock, Pesticide! Bridge: now!” 

There was no pause for the mount to process the command. It simply did, without any consciousness to guide it. Nothing living was behind the eyes. Not truly. Lett knew that, because its heart wasn’t beating. He had been told by his former friend that the heartbeat of a dragon was very loud, because they had such powerful hearts. But this one was silent. It didn’t even breathe. It wasn’t alive, so Lett didn’t really care what was happening to it. 

At Desput’s command, it lowered its head until its nose was pressed against the wall of Lett’s former room, and then something in the church’s foundation began to whine and scream at the force of the mount’s strength, and then with a crash and a rumble the wall broke apart. 

“I’ll get it!” Desput squealed cheerfully, hopping down the bridge of the nose like an excited fool. “Which one is it?”

“On my nightstand,” Lett said. “That’s where it is.”

“Let’s see, let’s see… Ah, here it is!” Loot in hand, Desput soon returned, though even with the mission completed, the mount did not move. It did not have enough consciousness to know that it was done. A slimy feeling reared in the back of his throat. He didn’t have time to name it before the book was placed in its hand. On the front of the cover was a dragon with five horns. He frowned at it. Then, he realized what emotion he was feeling—disgust. Sheer disgust. 

Desput hovered into his vision, upside down again. “Hmmm? Why are you sad? Should I burn it? Come on, let’s burn it!”

“No!”

“Not burn it? Okay.” Dejected, Desput floated off. “But the church,” he muttered. Then, triumphant, he repeated it, “The church! Yes, yes, let’s burn it! And while I burn it, you eat, yes? You must eat, or else you will not have the strength to glob those fritzes.”

“Yes,” Lett said. He slid the book into a large inner pocket in his fancy outfit’s jacket, and focused on the food again. It was cookies with an abnormally small teapot, and matching tiny teacups. Lett had never had tea before, but he had read about it in the journal of an explorer who went to the south. Around the picnic cloth, he was joined by about half a dozen stuffed animals, though he couldn’t recognize what animals they were. Some had too many limbs, some too few. They had all been carefully propped up, with little tea cups and empty plates in front of them. Lett looked at his own plate and cup.

“Back up, back up!” Desput screamed at the mount. “Far enough to—that’s enough, no more! No more! Yes, and now… Burn it! Burn it all, hahahah!!”

Lett reached out to a small odd tower of plates and removed a few cookies. There was one which was a spiral, with purple jelly making up the spiral. Another was small and round, but with an indentation pressed into it to add a blot of purple jelly. Then, there were checkered squares that looked like those of a board game, with half the spots in purple and half in white. Some were pastries with purple jelly filling, others were soft cakes with purple custard and purple icing and purple cream. Lett filled his plate with them, and then poured himself a cup of stark purple tea. 

He ate and drank as the church went up in flames.

“Yes! Yes! Hahahah, oh, it’s beautiful! Lett, are you seeing this? This must be how Hertig the seventeenth felt at the battle of Finders two! Burn, burn, yes!” 

The cookies tasted like something Lett had never eaten before. It was a bit tangy and extremely sweet, painfully so, but there was also a little hint of sourness. He could tell it was a fruit, but not what fruit it was. It was a bit similar to garbäärs, which he had always hated growing up. When his father brought home treats for him and his brothers, they would always sit down and split them up, all evenly. Luvid was the only one who liked garbäärs, even though Gyem would usually eat anything and everything. Lett had always been the picky one. Sometimes he’d only get one or two berries while they got whole handfuls. He’d get so jealous then. But, in truth, he wasn’t really mad at them. He was just angry at himself for being so picky.

He drank the tea. It had the same taste. Even though it was warm, very warm, it felt cold going down and settled in his stomach like a lump of ice. 

Desput was in front of him again, floating. The outfit was different from the last. Now, he had a billowing patchwork cape that seemed hand-sewn, alongside a more regal, almost military uniform. But he was still just a kid. Barely older than Lett. Even now, with his silhouette framed by the purple flames of the burning church, Lett felt neither respect nor fear for him. 

“Hold still,” Desput said, pressing his gloved hand to Lett’s bare, sweaty forehead. “Hmm… So far, you’ve absorbed about §0,00497. Halfway there! A bit more, and you’ll be a fully-fledged apostle. And not like the dumb stupid semi-hemi-demi apostles they have on this planet, who only have one percent of the divinity of one-percent gods. No, you’ll be a real apostle! Oh, I’m so excited! Have you decided what you’ll do first, aside from burning this whole place and all? Reign destruction on that dirt-lump the pinkies came from? Or maybe destroy all the other churches of children, too?”

Lett didn’t answer. He just ate and drank and didn’t want to think about anything else. The more he ate and the more he drank the colder he felt. And there was something slimy in his skull, too. Like his brain was being replaced with purple goo, node by node. But it wasn’t just soft anymore. It was starting to crystalize in him, turning colder, sharper, deadlier. 

When he looked at his hand, it felt unreal. As though it wasn’t his anymore. In the harsh purple light of the flames, he couldn’t even tell what color it was anymore. Was he still green? Or had he turned all-purple? 

Desput floated back a little. “I see. You’re concentrating on the battle to come. The revenge you’ll take on those rotten halflings and the humies and that whore-son Jan-Erik. I’ll let you have it. Don’t you worry about it, Lett. No master is cruel enough to take such precious sweets from his most beloved serf. Because you are my most beloved, Lett. You know that, don’t you? I have no one else. All my people are mindless. I had no other choice. All of this that I’m doing… It’s all to save them. That’s what a good master does. The god of multitudes and that accursed god of love refuse my efforts. But you don’t. You understand me. When all this is done and over with, I’ll give you this planet. Then, you can do whatever you want with it and the pathetic hemi-gods that live here. This revenge is mere prettiness compared to what you’ll be able to reign then. Aren’t you excited? You look forward to it, don’t you?”

Lett ate the last cookie, and emptied his final cup of slimy cold tea. “Okay.”

“Yeah. Yeah, exactly.” Desput turned away from him, towards where they were coming from. “They’ll be here soon. My hearts are pounding.” He looked back at Lett, half-grinning, half-manic, half-desperate. “Hey, Lett?”

“Okay,” Lett said, but then realized his error. He added, “Yeah?”

“You love me, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Lett agreed. 

“Good. Good. I’m not sure what I’ll do if you abandon me again. I might not…” The god of kings giggled like a traumatized little girl who didn’t understand what had happened to her. “Nevermind. It’s unimportant. That’s all over with, and now you’re my friend, and you love me as I love you.” Giggle turned to snicker turned to chuckle turned to laughter. “No worries! They’re soon here. Soon, soon. Hey, Lett?”

“Yeah?”

Desput’s face gleamed with pathetic madness, painted purple by petty flames. “Let’s give them a show, shall we?”

“Okay,” Lett said. 

And that they would.