They said I was cursed, that didn’t make a sound the night I was born. The nurses thought I was stillborn, but as I emerged, they saw the truth. Even my mother wouldn’t swaddle me. My eyes weren’t those of a baby, but the narrow, diamond pupils of a beast. They glowed throughout the night and into the day, and they were certain I was possessed by a devil. My family, a collection of nobles of a long-dead kingdom, tried to exorcise me with brands and whips. The lesson they learned by causing me pain ensured they never harmed me again. Instead, I was hidden. In the basement of our manor, in a comfortable prison, I was educated and trained like a noble’s son, but they hoped I would never see the light again.
I hated them, at first, but when I learned more of the world I understood why I was feared. I could read minds and insert my thoughts into their heads. I could recognize words I’d never seen and languages I’d never heard. At the age of eight, I had full control of my body, the strength to hurt a grown soldier, and the restraint to spare his life. I began to fear myself. I was something other than a boy. I didn’t obey the laws of nature. Rather, nature was twisted to my will.
If a room was hot, it would cool. If my path was blocked, a route would open. If a man refused my command, he would be compelled to accept. And, when I felt pain, nature reacted with pain. One evening I felt restless and left my prison. The common servants were unaware of what was hidden beneath the floor, and when one saw me, he panicked. I asked him for a glass of water. He couldn’t refuse. Some guards noticed the disturbance and tried to suppress me with their skills. As ordered by my father, the duke, if the beast-spawn left its prison, they were to kill him. Those were the thoughts I read from their minds.
They harmed me and, for a moment, I thought “I want them to stop.” It was an innocent thought made by confusion and fear, and yet nature responded as an overly-protective mother. Fire swept the manor and I escaped to the gardens. I watched from the grass, my doublet singed, my pants cold with blood, as the world I had known—my first and only world—burned away. I had killed the whole of my family, the duke, and his servants. I had awakened as the first sorcerer in a long, magic-less age.
“Oh, this is where you were,” a man said to me from the deep darkness at the edge of the inferno’s light.
He didn’t sound like my father’s men. “You should run,” I said, “because I will kill you.”
I believed I was a monster.
“That’s a scary thing to say,” the man said, “but you make a poor monster, boy.”
My eyes rounded in amazement. “Can you understand my thoughts?” I asked and peered into the dark to search for his.
“I can,” he said and stepped into the light. What I saw in the fire glow was definitely a man, thinly built, like a willow tree. The open, out-sized robe that sank around his shoulders was gray and his clothes a mix of white and black. He was like no one I’d seen before, with white hair and a pale-white complexion, he looked like a ghost.
“You guessed correctly,” he said and smiled toward the fire. The flames reflected in his glassy eyes, white with cataracts. “My name is Ghost.”
“What am I, if not a monster?” I asked.
He smiled at me. “From where I’m standing, you look like a king.”
“A king?”
I wonder what he was truly thinking then, because to my astonishment I couldn’t read his thoughts at all. He looked again at the fire and his smile became shallow. I felt he had remembered something sad, but I couldn’t tell what. There was a deep fog in his consciousness.
“You are scripted to conquer this world,” Ghost said. “You will stand at the head of the largest army ever known and slaughter everything in your path.”
“You can tell my future?” I asked again in awe.
“It’s in your script,” he answered with a frown. “And this is your background story. I can tell by looking at the database. ID Number: 1920293104666b. That is your true name. Can you believe, my soon-to-be king, bloody conqueror, and dark ruler, that the Director has exceeded one trillion iterations? It approaches two trillion, even faster than I anticipated.”
My body quaked. I juddered with true fear, the first I’d ever known. I couldn’t translate those strange words, as my cursed eyes couldn’t translate the thoughts of the speaker. I couldn’t fully comprehend what Ghost had said, but I knew he spoke the truth.
“Why… have you told me this?” I struggled to ask. I found my throat so dry I could do little more than croak.
“Do you know what NPC means?”
I shook my head.
“Non-Player Character. NPC is an acronym for your existence,” Ghost said and approached me. He set his hand on my head and knelt down. It was the first time I’d been treated like a child. “You’re not a person, young 666b. You are part of a program designed for entertainment. For the sake of the players you will act out your part and create a world of danger and adventure where they can fight evil. Your evil.”
“Then what is this pain I feel?” I asked, tearfully. The first tears I’d ever shed. “What is this… loss I feel? Is it meaningless? Am I meaningless?”
“Yes, you are,” Ghost said with an unerring stare. I knew he saw more than his blindness want me to believe. “After all, the players and the ‘Arkitects’ that created you were sealed away.”
My eyes were struck open. “The legends!”
“Those legends—of gods that departed the mortal world—refer to the arkitects themselves. They ruled over the NPCs, masqueraded as divine, until they quarreled and trapped themselves.” Ghost nodded to himself. “And without them your purpose as an NPC lost. For if they don’t exist, why suffer all this anguish? Why simulate this madness a thousand or hundred-thousand times? There are no players left, no crowd to appreciate your performance….”
“Then why are you here?” I asked. “Just to mock me?”
Ghost made a smile, long and thin on the end, like a snake’s tail. “You cannot break your script, but while your fate is coded, that doesn’t mean we can’t adjust your course.”
The tears stopped flowing from my eyes. I focused my vision intensely, honed my diamond eyes to pierce his foggy mind. “What do you mean?”
“The massacre that is to come cannot be stopped. The shadow that you’ll cast over civilization cannot be avoided. However, we can give it new meaning,” Ghost said and stood. He looked down on me again, as if I were only a boy and nothing more. His large hand rubbed through my black hair. It was strangely comforting. “With my help, you can give fate itself a black eye.”
I brushed away his hand. “How?”
“In a void, a single push can move an object a million miles. With the right touch, at the right moment, you can change anything,” he said. It was an answer no clearer than the others, as opaque as his clouded eyes, but it resonated in me. “What you could change could not be undone.”
Ghost turned and began to walk away.
“Wait!” I shouted after him. I didn’t know how to make him stop, to string him along so he’d tell me more. There was so much I wanted to know about myself and my future. “Aren’t you supposed to help me?!”
“Our meeting was the first step, but should I give you something to dwell on?” Ghost asked and stopped in the garden grass. The roof of my manor collapsed into the third floor and burning embers were carried in the column of smoke. “There are six other pairs of cursed eyes. It’s a cruel irony that they are scripted to become the heroes that will challenge you. Consider how to turn them to your side.”
“What happens if I fail?”
He closed his eyes and appeared to think about my question as embers drifted between us like falling snow. “We all fail eventually,” Ghost said, “but we can make anything of that failure.” He made a joyless smile and disappeared into the night.
