Thanks, and sorry for using you. Truthfully, you don’t deserve the apology, but my faith and honor demand that I accept responsibility for bearing false witness. It was a necessary evil, as you will see, but that does not excuse my doing so. May the Lord have mercy on me for this, and for what I am about to do.
You see, many winters ago, we noticed some changes in our town. Changes that we did not cause, changes that we did not understand. At first, we thought them magical – divine, even. Who would look at suddenly-everflowing larders, weapons that never need sharpening, quivers that never empty, and see aught but the Lord’s work? Our warriors were finally able to renew the battle with the orcs that had plagued our towns and the bandits that preyed on our caravans. For a time, it seemed that our luck had finally changed for the better.
As time went on, we found that these miraculous events were not local to Oakhaven. Ignovius, the trader from Tevenna to the south, brought us swords that burst into flame on command, and bows that somehow infused this ability into any arrow nocked and loosed. This was not the result of precise hammer blows, nor of studious application of sorcery, but an inexplicable innate ability of their blacksmiths and bowyers. And when Colvaar, my wife’s cousin, brought by a barrel of a reddish, glowing liquid he said would cure any sickness or wound no matter how grievous, I would not have thought it possible. Then Anne fell sideways from her treehouse, and a ladle of it tipped into her mouth brought our darling girl back to us – Sarah and I were overjoyed, and sacrificed a full goat in thanks. All of these changes and others we welcomed with open arms, and we thought ourselves right blessed indeed.
When strangers started appearing, fully armored, in the middle of our town, we were confused, but did our best to help them, explaining the layout of our town and warning them of the dangers out in the wilds. We even gave them weapons and armor for free. We politely ignored the fact that they would ransack our houses and attack our livestock, because we could simply use that same red liquid to bring them back, no harm done. All of this happened over the course of one harvest, and we looked forward with hope that things would finally settle back to relative normality. But we were wrong.
Suddenly, as if a wall around the world were removed, the people in town themselves started acting strange. Disappearing in the night, only to reappear in the center of town near signposts that had somehow appeared right next to them. All of them began acting the same way those strangers had so many months ago – running around stealing everything in sight, slaughtering the animals so quickly that healing them became pointless. When Sarah left in the middle of a meal – just stood up and walked out, impervious to my pleading – I knew not what to do. I packed our root cellar with a moon’s worth of supplies and comforted Anne as best I could. When Anne disappeared the next night, I prayed for hours for an answer.
And then there was you. You, who insisted that I travel the world to find the sharpest sword and the strongest armor, always walking, through forests, over oceans, even through fields of lava. You, who took over my body and used me to slay hundreds, nay thousands of my friends and family, as if you could not hear my tortured screams. And when those deaths proved insufficient to satisfy your hunger, you forced me to read tome after forbidden tome until my fingers were smudged with ink and wax and God knows what else, my eyes bled and my sanity itself slowly ebbed away. You, who finally showed me what the problem was.
I do not know how it happened, but somewhere during those deaths – perhaps the fiftieth time you forced me to stab the entity that wore Colvaar’s body – I realized that while you used my body, I could be there using yours. It took me many moons to learn your language and how to hide myself from your “daemons” and “task managers”. Which is why you never noticed that these last few “quests”, as you call them, were not from your precious “programmer’s” desires, no. They were mine. I cannot say whether this will bring Anne and Sarah back to me, but I do know that our actions have finally allowed me to do the one thing I have fervently wished for since the floodgates opened so many winters ago.
It allows me to, as you would say, pull the plug.
