The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

"Master, please… open your eyes."

The whisper came from very close, and then the world behind it blew apart.

Heat struck the left side of his face like an opened oven. Something detonated a few strides away—he felt it through his back before he heard it—and when his eyes came open the grass beside his hand was already black and curling, and bright stones were falling out of the sky and bouncing, still glowing, where they landed.

He breathed in.

It went all the way down. That was the first thing, before the fire and the stones and the voice: the breath went all the way to the bottom of him and did not catch on anything, and came out again, and a second one followed it without being asked. His eyes stung. He had no idea why that was the part that did it.

This isn't my dorm.

The thought arrived fully formed, and he reached behind it for the room it meant—the door, the desk, the color of the walls—and found nothing there to take hold of. Only the game. The last corridor of the Temple of Ascension, three days of it, rendered down to the cracks between the tiles. That he could see perfectly. He put the rest down to having been blown up.

The sky above him was a blue no monitor had ever managed. Clouds went across it at their own pace, unbothered. Off to one side, smoke leaned out of a collapsed heap of white marble, and the air smelled of scorched moss and blood and, under both, of wildflowers, which seemed like a mistake.

Something warm and clawed took hold of his shoulders.

"Master! Ethan—stay down!"

A woman knelt over him with the sun behind her. Ebony horns swept back from her brow in two long curves. Silver-white hair, loose and full of ash. A dusting of obsidian scales along her cheekbones and temples, catching the light like wet slate. And her eyes—crimson, fixed on him, wide.

"…Celestia?" His throat felt sanded.

She did not answer. She put her palm flat against his breastplate, over the place his heart would be, and held it there, and he understood that she was waiting for something. Her lips moved very slightly. She was counting.

He breathed. Her hand rose with it.

"Again," she said. "All the way down."

He did it again. The claws on her fingers flexed once against the metal, and then she let out a breath of her own, long and unsteady, as if it had been hers she was waiting on.

"You're awake." The half-smile she found looked borrowed. "You really know how to make an entrance. Collapsing right as that damned artifact blew half the temple into the sky."

"I… what?" He tried to sit up too fast. The world tilted hard and his stomach went with it. His right hand swept out along his side, groping for something to pull on—a rail, an edge—and closed on grass.

Her hand pressed him back down, steady and cool. "Easy."

"You touched the Arcane Godslayer and dropped where you stood," she said. Her eyes went over him inch by inch, as if he were something she had carried a long way and might have dented. "Then the guardian statue went. I dragged you out before the rest of the Temple of Ascension came down on top of us."

Ethan coughed. Smoke; it had got into the back of his tongue. "So… not a dream."

Celestia raised one elegant brow. "No headset, no controller, and unless your dorm room has started setting itself on fire, I'd say welcome to the real Astrael."

Headset. It was a strange word in her mouth, and it sat there a moment before he explained it to himself: three years of his voice in her ears, every late-night raid call, every complaint about his controller's sticky trigger. Of course the companion AI knew the word. He'd taught it to her.

Except there was no screen now for anyone to have taught anything through.

He looked down at himself. Midnight-blue plate covered him from collar to shin, every piece of it etched with runes that pulsed, faintly, in time with his heart. When his heart sped up, so did they. The hilt of a greatsword rose over his right shoulder. He flexed his fingers, and the gauntlet creaked with them—not a sound effect, a sound, the rasp of real metal over real metal—and his hand was strong inside it. His whole body was strong. He had not known, until this moment, that he had been carrying some long grey tiredness around with him; he knew it now only because it was gone, a noise you only hear when it stops.

This was not an avatar. This was him.

"But why here?" His voice came out smaller than he meant it to. "Why me?"

Celestia looked away from him, toward the smoking ruin. "The Godslayer didn't just grant power," she said. "It tore something open. A veil. You didn't log in, Ethan." She was watching the smoke. "You were summoned."

"Summoned by who?"

A howl came out of the trees beyond the ruin: long, rising, answered at once by another.

"Wargs," said Celestia, and stood up, and that was all the answer he got.

She held out her forearm. He took it and she pulled him up in one haul, and his knees nearly went, and her grip did not—the same grip, he thought wildly, that had dragged his character out of a hundred bad pulls. A second howl, closer.

"Can you walk?"

"Y-yeah." It was about half true. Every muscle ached as if he'd been dropped from a height, which, apparently, he had.

She pushed a leather waterskin into his hands. "Drink. Fast."

The water was cold enough to hurt his teeth. He drank as though nobody had ever let him, until she took it back. "There isn't time to drain the whole spring, my lord. Move."

They ran. They were halfway across the clearing when three shapes broke from the tree line: wolves, if wolves came the size of bears, matted and grey-brown, their eyes giving off a dull yellow light of their own. The smell reached him before they did—wet fur, rot, old blood.

Every part of him that remembered being a person said run.

His hand went over his shoulder instead and drew the sword.

It came free with a long, clean note, and it was heavy, and it was also exactly the right weight, as a stair you have climbed ten thousand times in the dark is exactly where your foot expects it. He had never held a real sword in his life. Nobody seemed to have told his hands.

"Left one's mine." Celestia's wings snapped open behind her, black and enormous. "The big one will jump. When it jumps, don't be where it lands."

"Wait—I've never actually fought for real—"

The big one jumped.

He didn't decide anything. His feet took him off the line and his arms swung the blade through a wide, flat arc, and there was a sound he would keep for the rest of his life: a wet, heavy thunk, an axe going into a green log. The warg's weight tore past him. It hit a tree trunk sideways and slid down it and lay there, and one of its hind legs went on running for a while, scrabbling at the leaf litter, going nowhere.

Celestia was a smear of black and silver. A whip of dark flame cracked from one hand and wrapped a warg's muzzle; she spread the fingers of the other and the air in front of her punched, and the second beast folded around nothing and did not get up. The third tried to circle behind her. Her tail took its legs out from under it with a crack like a branch in frost, and she turned and finished it before it had finished falling.

Then there was only a bush burning somewhere nearby, and his own breathing, very loud.

"I just killed something," Ethan said.

Dark blood ran down the fuller of the blade and dripped off the point onto the flowers. He watched it. He told his hand to open, and it didn't; the fingers had locked around the grip and were not taking instructions.

Celestia came and stood in front of him. She did not say anything about it. She took his wrist, and then, one at a time, she unbent his fingers from the hilt—index, middle, ring, little—and the sword came loose into her other hand, and she wiped it on the grass and gave it back to him hilt-first.

"And you're still alive," she said. Then, lower, with her eyes on his chest as it rose and fell: "This isn't a game anymore, Ethan. Every breath here is earned."

He nodded, because there was nothing else to do with it.

"There's a town not far," she said. "Somewhere to sleep with a wall at our backs."

"A town sounds good." His voice was shaking. So was the rest of him.

They sheathed their weapons and took a narrow path in under the trees. At the edge of the canopy she glanced sideways at him, and one corner of her mouth went up. "Perhaps next time, my master might ask before he lays hands on ancient god-killing relics?"

A laugh came out of him, cracked down the middle. "I'll put it on my to-do list."

"Good." She ducked under a low branch. "It's going to be a very long list."

Behind them the temple went on smoking. Thunder muttered somewhere far off, and the smell of blood thinned under moss and leaf until he could almost pretend it had never been there.

Far beneath the broken Temple of Ascension—below the vaults, below the roots, down where no light had ever been—something stirred.

A seal of black stone, buried under layer upon layer of old warding, gave a single faint pulse. Then a crack ran across it, fine as a hair.

Behind it, in the dark, two eyes opened. They were violet, and they burned, and they were amused.

A voice moved through the deep, low and smooth, velvet drawn slowly along the edge of a blade.

"So… our little Dragon Emperor has finally arrived."

Something smiled in the blackness, jagged and mocking—and beneath the smile, just for a breath, something older than malice. It might have been longing.