Seldomstone

James Warner

“I’ll start a new world for us,” Beani told me.

She was a lean fourteen-year-old, bald for now with a surgical scar on her forehead. Her mother, Darnice, a new parishioner of mine, had cornered me after a sparsely-attended Sunday service and invited me over for tea, having heard I was “good with kids.” But I was clueless how to entertain one who’d just had a grade 4 glioblastoma removed from her frontal lobe.

Fortunately Beani knew what she wanted to do.

Seldomstone is a first-person walker and fortress builder, an open-world sandbox game that transformed Beani’s PC into a primally-hued cloudforest. Whatever Darnice was hoping I could do, Beani just wanted someone who could watch and learn.

“I hope the game’s not too violent for you,” Darnice said, since Swedenborgian ministers are supposed to be pacifists.

“Mom!” Beani complained. Everything her mother said infuriated her—this much I’d anticipated. I remarked only that the forest onscreen did look ominous.

Her muscles weak because she was still on Decadron, Beani had chosen as her Seldomstone avatar a stone-faced warrior-angel. At first my role was to make suggestions while she operated the keyboard. Seldomstone days and nights each lasted about ten minutes. But while playing you lost track of time outside the game. First your avatar had to cut down trees and make a spear to kill animals—if you didn’t catch enough food, you lost vitality points until a message popped up saying Beani265 starved to death! and you had to start over without any of the resources gathered since your last save. Once fed, you hastened to build a predator-proof house before nightfall.

I liked it that in Seldomstone I was the child and Beani the grownup—I was the one saying, “Why don’t we explore that scary-looking cave?” and Beani the one responding, “Not such a good idea, and anyway we need to fell more trees.” I often wanted her to make houses that were too big, uncompletable by dusk, so that malamanders pounced through the missing ceiling and the game terminated with the message Beani265 was blown up by a malamander! A better tactic, Beani explained, was first to make an impregnable keep or tower, then construct a castle around it, then a sawmill close by.

Darnice brought us organic smoothies, kale crackers, and other items she’d read would help with the remission process, treats Beani ignored. Darnice tried to get into the spirit of the game, asking how our tree-felling was progressing, but she exasperated her daughter by getting details wrong. When Darnice asked whether you could club a malamander, Beani cried, “You are the stupidest mother ever!”

“They just spent six months radiating her brain,” Darnice said, while Beani left-clicked furiously. “She’s not herself.”

“I don’t know what kind of weird parallel universe you live in, Mom, but in this one, wood’s super-flammable. You never understand anything, ever!”

I was impressed by how realistically the wind soughed, in the reeds between the sawmill and the brook.

By the time the new keep was secure, it was time for me to go. “We moved out here just before Beani was diagnosed,” Darnice said, walking me to my Volvo, “and we don’t know anyone. We came for the schools,” she added, “but then she had to miss so much of eighth grade… I think she’d be menstruating by now, if it wasn’t for the chemo…” Beani had been through six months of concurrent chemotherapy and radiation—she was rapping on the windowpane now, communicating that her mother should stop talking. “I used to only let her play an hour a day, but now I’m glad she even has energy for gaming.”

I drove home more carefully than usual, hallucinating malamanders in the suburban shadows, reading sky shade as a coded Divine message about how far you could safely travel before finding shelter. It was harder than usual to pray that night, and I slept badly, frequently waking up with the wish that Beani and I had placed our sawmill further from that hideous cave.

 

The following Friday, I returned to Darnice’s house. The clamor of the high school Beani was slated to attend was audible as I parked in their driveway.

I’d brought Beani a C.S. Lewis book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Her hair was starting to grow back—she hoped to grow it as long as her avatar’s. Our world was paused where we’d left off—Beani had other worlds she played by herself or, in multi-player mode, with friends back East, but she told me ours was the most interesting so far, because we were near the intersection of several bioclimes and had access to rare resources like honey and phoenix feathers.

Unlike the arcade games of my youth, Seldomstone fully engaged my limbic-brain structures—it was hard to suppress a scream when a middenwraith swooped at you. The landscape—besides forest, there were flickering fjords and mountain ranges and playas—was procedurally generated, the sound effects sporadic and oddly terrifying. The game excelled at inducing the sense that it was late in the day and you were far from home—or the surge of hope while running through country starting to seem subtly familiar, promising you might not have to spend another night battling malamanders in the open—or the spark of wonder, after days spent repairing firesnake damage to the basement, upon going outside and being dazed by the color and scope and open-endedness of it all. You could decide based on sky color whether to do chores around a tower you’d built, or make a boat and set out to sea to settle new continents. You could find a new route between two places, forget it, and relearn it—or wait motionless until dawn for the chance to execute an evasive maneuver that, when the time came, got you set on by middenwraiths instantly. Beani265 was slain by middenwraiths! After a long hunt, you might die of starvation after killing an animal but before you had time to eat it—Beani thought maybe we needed a faster connection, but Darnice couldn’t afford the upgrade.

When we spent a Seldomstone night floating in a lagoon to hide from maraudons—these were gangly, and moved like rag dolls in the mouths of dogs, and I hated them—the stars were mere bobbing pixels, but felt like true stars.

Soon we’d over-hunted our surroundings and, finding fewer and fewer huntable beasts, set up a rice paddy and a phoenix farm. We spent three Seldomstone days fishing in a creek, watching for the splash that meant it was time to right-click and haul in our catch. Soon afterwards we found ourselves battling unusually aggressive maraudons in the ruins of a commonstone-flagged temple, every right-click a mortal thrust against opponents that, close to, resembled inquisitor-angels.

Playing Seldomstone invigorated Beani but also tired her, while Darnice watched from the settee. Beani unsurprisingly resented her mother’s scrutiny, any time she had a headache, any time she knocked something over. “I’m all right, Mom, okay? I said that already. Do you never hear words? Leave us alone. This is important.”

“Thanks for coming by,” Darnice told me afterwards. She did something in PR, I never understood exactly what, and couldn’t really see the point of computer games.

Beani was complaining to a friend on Skype.

“She seems better,” I suggested.

Darnice nodded thankfully, even as she scanned the vicinity for potential danger, a parental reflex—how to guard against its many forms? I told her to call me any time she needed help, and we agreed I’d return soon.

 

But once Beani was well enough to attend high school, she had lots of work to catch up on, so I didn’t visit again until a Saturday some weeks later.

“We need a safer place for our fortress,” Beani told me—so we built a boat from tree trunks and traveled across blue-glittering ocean for several Seldomstone days.

“She’s really gotten you hooked on this game, hasn’t she?” Darnice said, as we tried to disembark on an archipelago consisting mostly of krakens. Beani265 was dragged to the ocean floor by krakens and drowned! Darnice winced at the sea monster’s metallic roar.

“You gots to chill, Moms,” Beani said—when they were getting on, Beani and Darnice talked to each other like the mother and daughter in some TV show I’d never seen.

Darnice brought us kiwi fruit and we started over, setting off again in the opposite direction and discovering a whole new bioclime, where boars snorted in the undergrowth, while phoenixes floated past us on the water surface. If you took one off the water it caught fire, burning until only its feathers remained.

“I like my new school,” Beani told me as we waited patiently offshore for dawn—it was fatal to explore new territory at night—“except that nobody there plays Seldomstone. They say it’s for middle school kids.” At sunrise we swam alongside a firesnake-infested promontory—firesnakes couldn’t survive in water, and were the only things that scared Beani, because whenever you speared one, three more would appear—and excavated a staircase up a sheer cliff to a plateau below the snowline.

“That’s pretty,” Darnice said, and Beani rolled her eyes—she thought her mother overused that word. “Why do you always have to be angry at me?”

Beani yelled, “Why, when I’m angry, do you have to assume I’m angry at you? Now I’m angry at you for always assuming that!”

On the plateau we built a new keep, and surrounded it with a defensive wall of commonstone. There were streams here to fish in, and a glade in the forest where we could gather rarestones to decorate our castle, Beani and I taking turns at the keyboard. Rarestones could be used to sharpen a swordblade and enhance its aura.

In the real world it was sunny, but in the game it rained for a whole Seldomstone week, rain rendered by flickering blobs, impressionistic streaks that cooled the land enough for maraudons to come out, so that we had to stay within the commonstone wall, listening to rain crunch on the commonstone roof. We seemed doubly indoors, being inside in Seldomstone as well as in reality. Sometimes the screen froze into an eerie painting, Beani cursing the computer, and it felt as if we were in a realm of spirits.

At Darnice’s insistence, after three and a half hours we stopped playing—this was like coming up for air, and getting the bends—and went for a stroll around the neighborhood. There was a boy at school Beani liked, Eduardo, and she was more willing to talk to me about him when Darnice wasn’t around—she said he was kind of a misfit and kind of not a misfit.

She windmilled her arms as she talked about him. Eduardo had a PlayStation and despised PC gamers, but Beani was hoping to make him her next convert to Seldomstone anyway.

Darnice didn’t come to church the next day—as for Beani, she never came to church—and I delivered a sermon about this place I’d found that, like our own, abounded in evidence of having a maker. Swedenborgians have always believed in keeping theology and life in dialog with each other. To infer whether there is a Creator, I’d written in my notes, ask whether life has good gameplay mechanics…but wary of where that thought led, I claimed only that Seldomstone was as pristine and concrete as Swedenborg’s notion of heaven, a many-mansioned realm of winding rivers which quotidian life but dimly reflected.

Anything that draws us strongly, I told my parishioners, is pulling us either towards or way from God.

 

Since Darnice was working overtime now, to try and make a dent in the medical bills, and usually got home late, I agreed to drop in on Beani for an hour or two after school each day, to check on her and extend our fortress-palace beyond the flower-strewn impregnable keep. When the rain stopped, we planted an orchard—I taught Beani that Johnny Appleseed was a Swedenborgian, a bit of history for her—and added a balcony overlooking it to the outer perimeter defense wall of commonstone. No two sunsets in Seldomstone were quite the same—the algorithm that produced them must have factored in altitude, humidity, bioclime-type…or were the differences as much emotional as visual? Did a horizon suffused with ambient gold simply look different depending on whether you were perched on a crag to hide from malamanders—that sunset felt like a bleeding wound—or standing on our proud balcony, gazing seaward and reminded of Swedenborg’s phrase “the coast of spiritual longing?”

There we were attacked by a wyvern. Wyverns only lunged at you if you looked at them directly—by touching them with your cursor, something Beani knew perfectly well not to do. If maneuvered into a dark corner, a wyvern’s light went out and it was rendered harmless—but while trying to do this Beani had an epilectic seizure and lost control of the keyboard. Beani256 was devoured by a wyvern! One moment she was fixated on the screen, the next sprawled on the carpet, her pupils alarmingly large.

I called an ambulance, and Darnice met up with us at the pediatric intensive care unit. Beani turned out to be okay, but her doctors increased the dosage of her anti-epilepsy medication. “This is not a relapse,” one of them said, and explained that seizures were common after brain surgery.

“There’s no cause for concern,” Beani’s oncologist said with a frown.

Beani stayed overnight in hospital, and by the time I made it to her house the next day, she’d already rebuilt the keep, filled it once again with rarestones, and decorated it with torchholders. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“We need glowurchins to put in our torches.”

Setting out in a boat to fish for them, we got lost at sea, blown offshore, and had to spend several more Seldomstone nights fleeing krakens. We got wrecked downcoast, and tried to find our way back overland, through this terrain lacking maps or almanacs. In the afterlife, perhaps one is always agreeably lost.

Eduardo came over, and Beani opened up a new Seldomstone world to play with him, but it failed to engross him. They were in a rainforest where there was nothing to do but battle firesnakes, with lots of hissing. Beani and Eduardo were sullen and unresponsive together, in the usual manner of teenagers who ostensibly like each other. Click a button, and create a new dominion—it was almost blasphemous to have so many of them.

Once Eduardo left, Beani reopened ours, and after another Seldomstone day of hill trekking cried out in delight. We were only looking at an array of polygons, simulating familiar topography on the horizon, yet I too had the sense of returning home and fully appreciating it for the first time.

After one Seldomstone night in our impregnable keep, we finished rebuilding the commonstone wall, with a securer balcony this time. We gave our keep a moat and drawbridge. In our absence, the crops had ripened, and we set about reaping our harvest by interminably left-clicking on it. From now on we would stay closer to base and work on our defenses. In reality Darnice and Beani moved every few years, any time Darnice got a better job offer, but here Beani could put down roots.

“You need a big house to survive the winter,” she said, as Darnice returned from work. Seasons changed in Seldomstone. “I’ve never survived a whole winter. Stop freaking out!” she yelled, in response to a subliminal movement of her mother’s. Darnice, stacking groceries in the fridge, shot me a look of mute appeal, as if looking for the answers the doctors weren’t giving her. “Didn’t I tell you to stop freaking out? Why don’t you listen?”

Darnice left the room. When she came back in, she’d poured herself a measure of Smirnoff, and one for me. “Was Eduardo here?” she asked.

“Stop asking questions,” Beani said. “And don’t ask me how my day went.” Her hair was long enough now that, if she parted it a certain way, it concealed her surgical scar.

“Eduardo seems nice,” Darnice said, and Beani gritted her teeth in frustration. The vodka burned my throat—it was a drink I’ve never liked. “She’s menstruating now,” Darnice told me.

Beani slapped her forehead and asked rhetorically if it was too late to run away from home.

“Why do you always have to be so angry?” Darnice asked.

Beani said, “Why do you always have to be so stupid?”

I defused the situation by telling them about my own stint as a teenage runaway, living off a stolen credit card for three weeks, smoking pot—I too am sort of a misfit and sort of not a misfit, and my troubled youth comes in handy sometimes as a source of “teaching moments.”

By the time I left, Beani was smiling again. We had enough food for the winter, she told me, but we needed to put in a lot more work on our defenses. Darnice was on her third vodka, and the scene was nearly one of serenity.

 

Beani and I took to gaming several times a week. Our excavations had left mounds all over the landscape, like preparations for a primitive battle. The Seldomstone nights were still shortening, giving us more time to build.

In summer the snowline receded, the maraudons retreated to the mountaintops, and yams could be harvested safely from the swamps, but there was no resting easy. This game was all about making a plan which ran into unforeseen problems—wyverns nesting in the turrets, say—so you made a new plan to deal with that, which ran into deeper problems, forever sidetracking you. There was a necessity to this struggling with the kinds of tasks we were designed to struggle with, and catastrophe came on unforeshadowed.

At dusk, the mountain tips gleamed with a violet sheen, and we could hear the maraudons training wyverns to do their mischief for them. Repeatedly, we had to rebuild the keep and drawbridge and commonstone wall and replant the orchard, until their design was flawless. Playing Seldomstone I learned what it was like to agree on a name for a canyon I’d never revisit, or be seduced by the majesty of a vista into pressing on perilously, or stand on the bank of a mighty torrent and wonder about its source. Once we thought we saw a vein of seldomstone ore at the bottom of a gulley, but it turned out to be only scarcestone, not much use for anything.

Here you could voyage across an archipelago collecting all kinds of gems, and lose them by tripping off the stairway up the cliff on the way home. You could plan out an escape route through a cave complex, and get yourself cornered and devoured by middenwraiths. Seldomstone was a game you stopped playing in total exasperation and moments later thirsted to resume again, determined to avenge your losses. Looking at our stunning palace and paradise-garden, it was hard to believe we’d assembled it all stone by stone, plant by plant, again and again from the impregnable keep outwards.

And as we finished building the rarestone wall around the orchard, the sun cast a golden light on the waters on the other side of the ravine and Beani said, “This is further than I got in any of my other worlds.”

Like the groundskeepers at an abandoned château in wartime, we knew the right places to fish and gather honey, and what sounds required us to take cover, and Beani brimmed over with plans on how to extend and perfect our castle.

“We need one more wall,” she said.

I was more dexterous at killing malamanders than Beani was now, which I tried to attribute to my learning curve with the game, even when Beani failed to kill a middenwraith, although she was equipped with armor and a sometimestone sword.

“This stupid Internet connection is too laggy,” was her explanation.

But the next of the mass e-mails Darnice sent out, to friends and family—usually these were longer, full of qualifications, new treatment ideas, and inspirational anecdotes—just said They found more tumors.

“She wants you to keep playing,” Darnice told me when I came by the day after the MRI. “It means a lot. She’s always had a wild imagination.”

“Don’t try and understand me, Mom. Whatever comes out of your mouth is false.” I noticed Beani had put up a picture Eduardo had drawn of her slaying maraudons. Eduardo was a more realistic artist than the graphic designers of Seldomstone—Beani was very recognizable, and the maraudons more terrible than, until that moment, I’d known Eduardo understood.

“It’s good for her to focus on small things.” Darnice was beginning to lose her game face. The statistics on cases of relapse with stage 4 glioblastomas…unfortunately we were by now all experts on such things…but Beani wanted to keep going to high school. She was angry with the computer and her mother for being too slow.

“I think I’m getting tired of Seldomstone anyway,” she said. “Except our world. We’re going to need to tame some dogs. Mom can do that, because it’ll be funny to see what a crappy job she makes of it.”

“Thanks hon,” Darnice said. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

To tame dogs, you gave them flesh from a wyvern you’d slain. Beani named the dogs Darnice tamed Stupid, Stupider, and Stupidest, because they were so hard to train. There was a glitch in this version of Seldomstone that made dogs float slightly above the ground—but you believed in them anyway, because once tamed they were loyal and followed you everywhere.

Too tired to concentrate in class, Beani agreed to take a week off. That Darnice let Beani play on her computer all day now was a sign Darnice was not in denial about Beani’s prognosis. She told me one doctor thought Beani’s tumors had shrunk a bit, although it was hard to tell because of the swelling. I spent my evenings online-researching an experimental vaccine one of my congregation had told me about, but it turned out to be inapplicable in Beani’s case. Her multiple tumors made her unsuitable for most clinical trials, and were too numerous for another operation.

A rotating “sitting schedule” was set up—I was with Beani most afternoons now. I always had the keyboard, while she watched and gave me instructions—she was losing the use of her right hand, as malignant cells infiltrated her left motor cortex. She worried about getting behind in school. She spent a lot of time asleep, but when she woke up I reported on any progress I’d made, so she could make key strategic decisions. Darnice and I both felt we were drawing strength from her. We didn’t tell her that while she slept Stupid had been killed by a firesnake, or that Stupider had become a werewolf and I’d had to use the last rarestone sword to slay him—it had shattered in the process, with that musical sound precious things made when they shattered in Seldomstone—or that the days in Seldomstone were getting palpably shorter.

Conserving energy, Beani mulled over my questions and responded only to essential ones. She told me she thought the girls at school thought of her as an unhappy, afflicted person, which upset her because she didn’t feel that’s what she was really like. She fretted about one of her friends no longer talking to one of her other friends. She said Eduardo texted her every day, but only monosyllables like “Yo” or “Sup?”—and asked me if that meant he liked her.

As a get-well card, Eduardo had sent Beani a cartoon he’d drawn of her riding a waterfall down into a cave full of maraudons, killing them all with an axe, and escaping on Stupidest’s back, which seemed pretty conclusive evidence to me. Eduardo usually helped us with the game on Monday afternoons, and was becoming more obsessed with it than we were.

 

In Seldomstone you can fall through a hole while fleeing wyverns and discover a new cave complex, complete with petroglyphs containing survival clues. You can stand in a place you’ve laboriously cultivated, and feel wistful for the days when it was still wild. Like a T’ang Dynasty poet, you can be an exile watching wild geese soar overhead. You can stumble onto a spot you’d forgotten about long ago, that reminds you that you were once somebody else.

“To last the winter,” Beani told me, “we need to make a sword of seldomstone.” It was the only material you could effectively kill maraudons with, but seldomstone was practically impossible to find. Some commenters on the Seldomstone wiki denied there was any seldomstone in the game at all, that it was a cunning irony to name a game after a treasure it didn’t even contain. But Eduardo had heard you could train a dog to dig up a seldomstone by drawing a circle in front of the dog and left-clicking on the circle. Beani was initially skeptical—“I don’t know what kind of weird parallel universe you come from, Eduardo”—but later told Darnice to do this with “all three dogs,” it being established now that dog training was Darnice’s job.

Still not telling Beani that Stupid and Stupider were no more, Darnice just trained Stupidest. Seldomstone dogs didn’t look much like dogs at the best of times, and there was some additional glitch with Stupidest that made him intermittently see-through. He seemed to pay no attention when Darnice did the thing with the circle, but later I noticed he was gone, and Darnice pointed him out to me, far away on the sheer red cliffs—at that distance he was only a few pixels in size so it was hard to be certain—running along a ledge over the cloudforest. “That’s pretty,” Darnice said.

Beani had told me once, “My father lives on the other side of that forest.” She’d never met her father. The morphine she was on gave her nightmares, and it was getting harder for her always to know what was real.

Outside the rarestone wall, with the goal of constructing a safe garden ringed by the sea, I started work on a weirdrock barrier, although Beani told me it would be better to use glowurchins. This made no sense to me, because weirdrock was tougher than glowurchins—Eduardo agreed with me on this. Weirdrock had to be mined with a sometimestone pickax, which meant a number of dangerous trips to canyons full of flailing middenwraiths. Darnice managed to kill one with a sometimestone warhammer, a technique she was beginning to master.

This game felt intelligible to me now as a way of packing a whole lifetime into…however many weeks we had left. But Beani barely paid attention to Seldomstone any more. One afternoon she wanted to go to Walgreens to buy some lip gloss, and so I escorted her there. She had to walk with her hands out in front of her for balance. It felt like an epic voyage, and she didn’t fall once. We met another boy from her school, who acknowledged her with a barely perceptible neck motion. High school for Beani was like an afterlife she’d glimpsed only briefly. Her eyes were not tracking well now, and she couldn’t stay alert for long. She smiled as she bought the lip gloss, with the look of someone carefully fitting things together. She never applied the lip gloss though, just gave it to me to carry home, then forgot about it.

Most of what she and Darnice said was babytalk now, words becoming irrelevant as they relapsed into earlier prototypes of themselves. I could tell Darnice wished Beani would give her some of her old backtalk, some attitude or sarcasm. Sometimes I wish I was still a runaway, rather than a minister for a dwindling denomination. One advantage of a traveler’s life is that one does not often see people deteriorate.

 

Beani is out of treatment options and has been approved for hospice care, read Darnice’s next mass e-mail. Anxious now if she was left alone, Beani spoke as if with an unidentifiable accent. Day and night were becoming harder for her to tell apart, and she complained of a buzzing sensation on her tongue. She no longer always recognized me, sometimes mistaking me for a teacher and trying to apologize for overdue assignments. Once she sat up in bed abruptly and said with great agitation, “I can’t smell the glowurchins.”

Light scared her. People often have visions towards the end—it’s an odd thing for a Swedenborgian to say, but I hope I never do. Beani’s gray eyes, which now drifted independently from each other, were flecked with green as I told her the weirdrock wall was now complete. When I touched her forehead, she responded as if to an unsettling sound far away, her face flickering without really changing. The last time Eduardo came over, Beani had no idea who he was.

Darnice sat by the bedside and prayed—she was better at prayer than I was. Beani seemed calm as long she could hear her mother’s voice. She fidgeted, stopped eating—at times I just wanted it all to be over.

She woke up screaming a few times, then stopped waking up. Her coma lasted a long week, throughout which Darnice and I continued talking to her just in case, although what I was saying by that point was probably mostly nonsense.

Brain herniation was the presumed cause of death. Once Beani was relieved of her earthly mode of existence, everything else seemed more present to me, and the aliveness of the people I passed on the streets was alarming, as if I’d have been more comfortable among ghosts. Colors were too rich, contrasts too sharp, all noises too startling.

Our own lives sometimes feel like a very hollow simulation.

I’d failed to see it coming that I’d have to preside over Beani’s funeral, which I did completely on autopilot. Some of her old friends from back East had flown over. Eduardo’s suit made him look a lot younger.

Darnice had aged externally perhaps a decade in the short time I’d known her.

When she asked me afterwards if she would meet her daughter again in the afterlife—a topic rarely brought up during my seminary training, but of frequent concern to my parishioners—I told her Beani was safely home, that home was the place where Beani was safe, that heaven and hope are theologically the same.

Darnice gave me Beani’s computer because she wanted to get rid of any keepsake that reminded her of her daughter. “Take care of yourself,” she said, something you might have expected me to say to her.

I got the impression she pitied my helplessness. She certainly looked at me as if she didn’t know what kind of weird parallel universe I was from.

This was something Beani was right about—most of us don’t know what kind of weird parallel universe the rest of us are from. I bummed a cigarette from Eduardo outside the church. He asked me if there was a God, and I replied that the fact we can ask such a question proves we know the answer. Who knows where I come up with this stuff? Darnice also returned me my copy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which I gave to the first homeless guy I met on the way home. I found Beani’s lip gloss in my pocket and threw it into someone’s garden.

Back home, I smoked some pot—from the glass jar full of ziploc bags I keep in my freezer in case of emergency—forming questions and watching them drift apart like clouds.

When I next drove through their suburb, their house was for sale again and Darnice was gone. Only the sound of the high school was unchanged, a fluent undercurrent of battle noises. Everything here spoke eloquently of suburban compromise—it was like a zoo meant to keep teenagers away from dense population centers, a realm of garage sales and missing pet notices, duplexes and starter homes, a neighborhood which, except for that one Walgreens, I don’t even associate with Beani—when I remember her, I remember us together in the Seldomstone world.

To that land I dared return only once, with the idea that here was the legacy Beani would have wanted me to preserve, our painstakingly-constructed hideaway, the edifice we’d made to bury our fears. It was like returning to hallowed ground, as horrifying as going back to church after too long an absence, and as I logged back in, the maraudons were already descending from the mountains—more maraudons than I’d ever seen together before, in such numbers that processing their movements was making the PC more sluggish than usual.

That uncanny slowness haunts me—it made it seem possible this Seldomstone night would last forever, let alone this Seldomstone winter, and I saw all the maraudons were armed with seldomstone warhammers.

When the program uploaded this slowly, the predators flickered into being slightly before the landscape did. Our castle assembled itself component by component, as the program stutteringly rendered our fragile creation. Beani had been right—we should have used glowurchins for the outermost wall, because it turned out weirdrock exploded immediately on contact with seldomstone, triggering an inferno that soon consumed the rarestone wall too. When I saw Stupidest beside me, with a seldomstone blade in his jaws, I mistook him at first for some fresh monster.

The orchard had caught light, slow-burning tree limbs splaying under an ambering sky, and after wyverns carried off the blocks of the commonstone wall one by one, Stupidest and I—it seemed a miracle he was here, but he was only following his training, having slipped through the ranks of the maraudons with my weapon—we were left with only the impregnable keep still to defend.

Even when we were building that keep, in the Seldomstone summer, Beani had understood we were at war and made us decorate it with rarestones, which could be used to sharpen a seldomstone blade, so all its attacks would be powered-up—the task felt sacramental, but I should have raised the drawbridge first, because even as I finished sharpening it, the maraudons were already filing into the keep with the discombobulated, trancelike gait of single-purposed creatures. I smote them in turn, aiming the cursor and double-clicking. The maraudons clattered as they fell, and Stupidest finished them off one by one with his teeth, then bowed his head as if hoping for absolution.

This was a reversion now to the simplicity of the arcade games of my misspent boyhood. But the blade’s aura was already fading, and as I lost vitality points, the maraudons seemed infinite like Satan’s hosts besieging the inner sanctum of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Except that I was the intruder here, and the maraudons were Seldomstone’s immune system, sent to repel me from reaches I was never meant to inhabit. I felled them, and Stupidest slew them, and they kept coming till I had no thought for anything else.

 

© 2018 James Warner

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James Warner‘s stories have appeared most recently in Georgia Review, Interzone, EPOCH, Ninth Letter, and Your Impossible Voice. He may be the first person ever to organize a hundred and seven literary readings taking place on the same day. When playing Minecraft, he spends most of his time searching for houses he lost long ago.