More Than A Game (Epic LitRPG adventure)

Chapter 6: Gringvort

A quick glance at the clock when I climbed out of the capsule shocked me; I'd been playing for quite a while.

That Mammoth is a sneaky son of a gun. I was on the job the whole day and even a bit more, I thought. But that idea was quickly interrupted by two more base instincts. I was hungry and...well, I needed to do something else. And that second one needed to happen soon.

Having eaten and cleaned myself up a little, I sat down at my computer. It was about time to get started on my article. The clock was ticking, after all. I looked at the open text editor in front of me. And looked, and looked.

"I need more material first. Then I'll have this thing whipped out in no time... Later..."

I was about to turn off my computer when I remembered lying wrapped up in the blanket and hearing Elina and Gerv talking about the Great Dragon quest and getting to Rivenholm in ships. Nothing Gorotul said could be described as anything but a stream of consciousness. I had made a mental note to look up both of those—really, to figure out what Rivenholm even was. Also, I needed to see if I could dig up anything about that Wanderer. Maybe there was something online? Probably not.

I logged onto a forum and started with a search for the Great Dragon. As it turned out, I shouldn't have skipped reading all the Fayroll lore when I started playing. The history was far-reaching, fascinating, bloody, and varied. It was especially rich in wars. There were the two Skeleton Wars, the three Wars of Loathing, and another dozen that went nameless. However, the most brutal and violent was the War of the Dragon. Some thousand years ago, long before there were ever any players, all the intelligent races in Fayroll clashed. On one side were the undead and unhumans under the command of the Great Dragon—a real one, fire-breathing with wings, the last of the hymenopterans in Fayroll. His ranks included skeletons and liches, specters with their dogs of death, trolls, zombies, and orcs. On the other side, were the light and intelligent races: people, elves, and dwarves...well, and halflings and everyone else who more or less fell into those categories. The fighting started off small, and, naturally, the undead and unhuman started to lose. However, things escalated into genocide as whole dark races were wiped out in their native lands. That was when their leader, the Great Dragon, uttered a pronouncement, "If fate has not deemed us worthy of victory, our time has not yet come."

He disbanded his forces, conceded victory to the light races, and petitioned for an end to the pointless killing. However, in exchange for his forces laying down their arms, he demanded that they be exempt from prosecution aimed at destroying them or extracting reparations in civil courts. The war was over, and they needed to get back to living.

The light powers acquiesced, pointing to both their own war weariness and, they said, their innate goodness. But they didn't keep their word. It wasn't deliberate, and it wasn't all of them, but the damage was done. A few dwarf squadrons either didn't know about the armistice or were goaded on by their eternal stubbornness to keep fighting, and annihilated a large tribe of orcs—green, toothy, and unarmed—after they got into a fight with some dark dwarves. In short, it was a mess.

The Great Dragon learned what had happened and, enraged, pronounced a curse on the light races. But he designed that curse as a quest. A super-mega-extra-rare quest. In fact, it was so rare that not a single player in the history of the game had found it. What it included was a mystery, though its reward was not—the ability to call forth all the dark armies and in essence become the Dark Lord. The rumor went that the ability was somehow limited, but nobody knew what that limitation was. Enormous amounts of time were spent by all the clans trying to find it, though how to get it, who gives it, and what you have to do were all unknown.

A few players had gone on about how they'd found the hallowed quest, though they all later turned out to be False Dmitriys looking for a free ride.

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