Enchanted by the beauty of the world he had entered, he forgot the unpleasant awakening. He had never seen grass like that: the plants had a small stem, which ended in one single disk-shaped leaf of about two inches in diameter. Its top surface was dark green, whereas the belly was light. The whole meadow seemed covered in millions of green plates, neatly scaled one over the other. Now and then, a gentle breeze caused small ripples in the two colors, changing the orientation of the scales.
The walls of some tall mountains in the distance were proudly watching over the hill. He didn’t recognize them—in fact, he was pretty sure no treatise had ever described them because they were conceived by the fertile imagination of this world’s inhabitants. They didn’t seem nearly as huge as the Roch-Alixxors, but they were perhaps even more beautiful, their mile-high vertical walls of red sandstone being dented by deep valleys and surrounded by dark woods or green meadows like the one in which he rested his tail.
After he got to his feet, he turned to see the place around him. In the next second, an exclamation of astonishment came from his throat because not far from him, the earth ended. It ended in the most literal way, and nothing took its place. He was standing on the most bizarre form of relief possible—an island, one of many such patches of land he could see. They didn’t float in the waters of an imaginary ocean but in the atmosphere of a planet larger and more absurd than imagination could conceive. Surely the atom’s laws wouldn’t allow for such a place to exist in reality—and, in addition, a planet that massive would bathe the environment around it in a blanket of deadly radiation, instantly killing anyone so close to it. But in a virtual world, the architects didn’t feel bound to follow all of Zhan’s laws…
The meadow was near the edge of the island, separated from it by a stream that flowed in parallel with the shoreline before disappearing in a golf of air—no doubt forming a spectacular waterfall hidden from his view—and a small dune right on the coast.
Looking through the gulf of air, he could see, dozens of miles underneath, a blanket of translucent brown clouds enveloping the surface of the giant planet in a death shroud that stretched forever; his eyes couldn’t reach the horizon. It was an eternal mist, a sinister, toxic smog that enslaved the surface of the planet. Certainly life—even a virtual one—couldn’t grow roots in such a terrible place…
The clouds beneath were far from homogenous, but their movement didn’t have the slightest resemblance to the known weather patterns. They appeared animated by a will of their own that made them twist and rise toward the sky islands like the hideous, sprawling fingers of a giant monster hidden in the mist. Much lower, there was a second layer of gray fog that licked the ground along some invisible valleys, avoiding higher areas and without mixing in any way with the brown clouds.
From place to place, huge slabs of rock were visible through the gaps in the cloud blanket. They looked like broken pieces of stone columns, crippled and tumbled, stuck in grotesque angles, resembling the remains of colossal temples worn by the passing millennia. In other places, he could glimpse long, jagged rock edges that looked like rusty sarpan blades abandoned on a long-forgotten battlefield—fault lines eaten by unnamed deluges.
It was like the planet’s surface had piled up all the madness of destruction, ruin, and decay caused by Antyrans over millennia of warfare, perhaps even imagined by legends, perhaps repeated over and over again in countless versions and endings, mixed with a million years of the unrelenting fury of nature. The ugly scars in the bedrock displayed all the telltale signs of global glaciations and catastrophic flooding when the ice dams of the glacial lakes were breached by the whims of the planet’s axial tilt.
When he raised his eyes from the frightful sight, he found that things looked much better at his level. The crystal-clear blue sky was dotted by countless islands like the one he was standing on, hovering at wildly different heights. Due to the incredible visibility, he could track them until they reached ridiculously small sizes—little more than specks of dust lost in the almost infinite depths of space.
The floating worlds were irregular pieces of land of various thicknesses, seemingly pulled by a mad giant from the planet’s crust and thrown up into the sky. Under the cover of the fertile soil, ancient rock strata or sediment layers of different colors were clearly visible.
Each island was different from the others. One nearby was almost entirely covered in water and dotted with small, rocky islets, surrounded by sharp reefs that broke the fury of the waves. Enticing sand beaches stretched behind these barriers, and lush vegetation invaded the interior.
Other floating realms were covered by tangled jungles of fantastic trees, barren or forested mountains with steep walls, deserts streaked by deep canyons, or volcanos in full eruption; several were sunk in shadow or even in their own personal night—basically, the air around them was dark. Gill could still discern thousands and thousands of lights flickering into the night. Probably campfires spread throughout the licant-infested valleys. The realms of the games! Each island was a different game? His eyes couldn’t pierce the thick darkness, but he imagined huge virtual armies gathered in the hearts of the night, thousands of soldiers holding torches while preparing to commence nocturnal battles under the orders of the bixanid players, to live again the legendary sieges of the ancients…
Maybe in the light of the fires, sweaty orzacs tied the straps of their moulans, screwed the metal sheaths on their tail spikes, dressed in their cold armor, and left to attack. They left to tear down again the white walls of Zagrada, the capital of the grahs, and conquer one by one the stockade altars of Pixihe, Colhan, and the other fake gods of the ice worshipped by the ancient Antyrans and grahs before Zhan’s coming. The passion for ancient history of the archivist inside him urged him to be in the middle of them, to fill his nostrils with the stench of their moulans and feel the cold sweat of the battle anticipation oozing under the scales of his armor.
The nearest island was larger than the others, a frigid world with tall mountains and massive glaciers, their ice tongues forming vertical walls several hundred yards tall, right on the shoreline. The rivers that sprang from the central peaks burst into light through the translucent blue walls, giving birth to milky waterfalls that fell for miles in the abyss before turning into clouds and then disappearing altogether. The real Antyra must have been so frozen before the firewall. And that’s how it will look shortly, he thought as he remembered the terrible madness raging outside the serene borders of the virtual world. The bracelet! Ugo! Suddenly, the memory of the awful meeting came back to his kyi like a cold shower—and along with it, the image of his inert body abandoned like an offering in the greasy fluff of a cave dug in the incinerated crust of Antyra III. He had no time to waste with the breathtaking scenery, so he regretfully turned his back to the gulf of air and rushed to search for the old Antyran.
Gill found him not far away, lying under a tree. The old Antyran was lazily chewing a mouthful of discoidal grass and didn’t seem to be thinking of anything.
A detail immediately struck Gilclass="underline" he didn’t resemble his real-life double. If the nest in the catacombs hosted a skeletal creature, kept alive by a bunch of devices and feeding tubes, under the tree was an Antyran about twenty years younger. He had a lively, expressive face and strong spikes, covered by the transparent cups of the interface.