It was a barren world.

All Sarah could see, in every direction, was a landscape of rocks and dust, extending to the horizon where it met a uniformly depressing sky. In the distance she could catch a glimpse of water: a lake, or more properly a puddle, reflecting the reddish gray of above. Low promontories lay scattered all across the planet, all of them indistinct and silent. That was all.

That, and the fortress in the sky.

Inverness was up there, suspended in midair at an incredible height, looking as imposing as Sarah could have imagined. It was hard to estimate its size because it was hard to determine how far away or how high up in the firmament it was — but it sure was big, with its huge dome and the myriad of windows all around. No sound could be heard from where Sarah stood but it should certainly be loud too, as it was held up in the sky by dozens of rockets pointing down. She could see the traces ejected by the rockets, a cylindrical curtain of ghostly lines shooting down from the palace.

Inverness.

This landscape of utter solitude had caught Sarah by surprise. If Victor Anderen wanted to live forever (in the words of the Great González) as a god in this virtual world, why on earth would he place his dwelling on such a depressing, featureless landscape? There were so many amazing sights in the Anderverse, surely many more than Sarah had glimpsed in her worldjumping, but he had chosen to have this shit to contemplate every day.

The grey sky was turning from reddish to greenish. It was the only variation Sarah could see: chemicals in the atmosphere, most likely. She didn’t see any animals or plants, and her Perception skill didn’t alert her of any other notable presence.

A man approaching death doesn’t usually have the means to dodge it. Victor Anderen was probably the only man on earth who actually could, but he was here, living in a dead world, as if he was seeking death despite his tremendous effort to negate it. All the windows in his sky palace opened to a planetary grave.

We all are running away from our ghosts, but we carry our ghosts within ourselves.

For the first time, perhaps, Sarah felt a pang of pity for the Game Master. Her resolve didn’t falter, though — this was the man who had kidnapped her boyfriend and trapped him into a game without the most basic tools to survive in it, and who had made sure she was trapped inside as well.

But she also realized, now, why Victor Anderen had done all this. Not the “living forever” bit or the “creating a fantasy world and becoming its ruler” bit, but the “kidnapping Mike and pulling her inside the game” bit. He had done this out of love. Or at least his own twisted, maniacal, even psychotic notion of love.

Victor Anderen had become infatuated with Sarah a while ago, maybe on her very first day on the job at Digidream. He was old, powerful but lonely; she was young, pretty, and eager to learn from him and give him the best she had to give professionally. He didn’t want her professionally, though. He craved for her, he wanted to have her. And when the first signs of the final phase of his illness became apparent, when he started creating his own private virtual reality to inhabit forever, he decided that she would be there with him too. Forever.

How exactly he was planning for her to fall in love with him, Sarah had no clue. She hated his guts now, and that wasn’t likely to change in the near future.

She hated the Game Master, she despised the Game Master, she pitied the Game Master.

Her Inventory showed an assortment of odd weapons. The small sword had returned, but instead of a big sword she now had a spear, and the bow-and-arrows slot was now occupied by a harpoon launcher (!!!). The flamethrower was a flamethrower and the horse was a horse.

But Sarah knew better.

She manipulated the Ring of Realms until Valiant turned once more into a portable attack ship. Then she retrieved it from the Inventory. The ship appeared beside her, ready to be piloted.

I wonder if my Stealth ability will extend to the ship when I’m inside.

Oh well, there was only one way to know.

Sarah climbed inside the ship and turned it on. The engine roared as the vehicle got ready for takeoff. Sarah activated Stealth and waited.

No, the ship was still visible. The Game Master would see her approaching the sky palace.

Bummer.

Sarah punched a couple of buttons and held the lever in position. She guided the ship carefully, taking no risks. She had never taken off the ground with one of these (the other time she had flown it, she had just drifted into space from the mothership), but this being a game after all, she found the controls basically self-explaining. A few seconds later, Valiant was flying.

* * *

There had to be something magical about the floating fortress, because as Sarah approached it, she heard no sound. At this distance the roar of the rockets holding it up in the sky should have been deafening, but instead of it, there was silence.

As Valiant kept rising and her line of sight became larger, the plains down below looked just the same. Sarah could see the same rocky terrain extending in all directions, a myriad of tiny hills and a couple dozen patches of water being the only visible features.

Sarah was so absorbed in her own thoughts that when the voice came, she flinched, and a pang of adrenaline shook her back.

“Hello, Sarah.”

It was an ethereal voice, abstract, disembodied, that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Sarah had no doubt that it came from inside the sky palace, but it felt as if it were right beside her, and behind her too. The voice of a man, not a man she would know but an idealized version of a man: a deep voice, rich in intonation, vibrating with power and charm.

“Hello, Victor,” she replied. Her voice came out less firm than she would have hoped. Right now she felt pretty much powerless. She was basically trapped inside a tiny ship shooting across the sky of a world that belonged to this powerful entity — she had the impression that he could just blow and send her spiraling downward to her death, or just snap his fingers and make the ship disappear altogether, or extend a gigantic hand out of the fortress and crush both Valiant and Sarah in a fraction of a second.

“Yes, that was my name,” the voice stated matter-of-factly as Sarah approached the fortress in the sky. There was an opening right in front of her: evidently, she was supposed to enter the palace through it, she was being invited to enter by the Game Master. She pointed the ship at the opening and waited.

“Is it not your name anymore?” she asked.

“My identity is... complex,” the Game Master replied. Even his hesitation sounded self-assured and charming. “Yes, I am still Victor Anderen, but I am more than that now.”

“I don’t care how much you are,” Sarah retorted. “You kidnapped my boyfriend. You lured me into your fucking allucination. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just scum.”

There were several seconds of silence. When the answer came, the Game Master’s sounded hurt.

“You were supposed to love me.”

“You are sick.”

The Game Master fell silent again. The sky started reddening once more. This time it didn’t stop at reddish gray; it went all the way to blood red, so deep that Sarah half expected it to start dripping. Raining blood. That would be something to see.

“The vines, back then in the simulation,” Sarah said. She had just remembered the incident; she was thinking out loud as she spoke to Victor. “You tried to kiss me that night, but something happened before that. There were those vines. Those vines that were trying to rape me in the forest. It was not a glitch. It was you.”

“I love you, Sarah. I’ve loved you since—”

“You are a sick fuck!”

The Game Master didn’t answer.

Sarah had arrived. Valiant crossed the open bay and entered the sky palace. After a short tunnel there was a landing area. Sarah maneuvered the ship and deposited it expertly on one of the marked areas. She stepped off and looked around. The place was much more lively than she would have thought, with a garden and aquarium encircling the whole enclosure. There was an escalator, too, leading up to what would be the heart of the fortress. Sarah retrieved her sword, made a beeline to the escalator, and stepped on.

“I’m gonna kill you,” she announced. “Have you heard that? Let us go safely or you die today.”

“I was hoping you’d want to stay here,” the Game Master replied. “We could live together, go out and have amazing adventures. It would be a lot of fun.”

His voice was no longer abstract or omnipresent. It was a particular voice, one that Sarah identified immediately. Also, it was coming from a definite point in space now, right at the upper end of the escalator.

As she was pulled up at a leisurely pace, Sarah prepared to meet the man.

She raised her sword, her muscles ready to strike.

As she reached the top of the escalator, she could see him. Uberyn was standing straight in full armor, handsome and cheerful as ever, extending his hand to her in a friendly gesture.