Hive Queen by Sinclair, Grayson (ereader iphone .TXT) 📗

at me; he wasn't even looking to Aliria, who stood silent as a wraith, her cold eyes drinking in the scene unfolding before her. Magnus was looking from his hands to the wall to stare into the soft lambent light of the candles. Anywhere but at me.

His behavior was stoking my curiosity. If he was going to play coy now, after all he had shown me...must be something big if it's got Magnus so nervous. My impatience overrode my fear at the answer. "Well, what is it?"

Magnus blew out a breath, long and slow. "What you are looking at was the true size of the world."

I didn't understand. "Was?"

Magnus Inclined his head. “Yes, this is the original map of the world for this server of the Ouroboros Project."

I backed up from the desk. That was too much information at once for me. I was already reeling from his earlier statements, and he went and threw me into even deeper water. I paced around the table, sorting through and dissecting his words. Okay, you can do this...Gods, I need a drink.

I stopped my circling and faced Magnus. "Okay, walk me through this. So first off, pretty much everything I know is wrong. Not only was the world much bigger than I realized, but there are other servers than this one?"

"Pretty much."

"What are they like?"

Magnus shrugged his shoulders. "I haven't a clue; I was only involved in creating this server."

"Fine. Whatever. What happened to the world?"

Magnus paused, his face grew slack as if he were nothing but a statue. He stayed quiet.

"Magnus?"

"...I don't know."

What the hell? No, seriously, what the actual hell?

"Okay, okay, okay..." I ran my hands over my temples; the alcohol in my system wasn't enough to stop the pounding headache that was trying to crush my skull. "Okay...not okay, so not okay."

Godsdamn it, I so don't want to know any of this. Magnus took note of my freak out and spoke to Aliria. "Would you have Magnolia or Jasmine bring him a drink? I'm sure he could use it."

Aliria turned and left without a word, leaving me alone with Magnus and with my thoughts.

I faced Magnus, my head pounding. "What do you know, then?"

He picked up the paperweights and neatly stored them in a drawer on the desk. He looked at me with eyes that held the weight of a dozen lifetimes and sighed. "All I know is, something happened just over three hundred years ago. A massive system crash nearly destroyed the entire server. Because I had admin access, I received advanced warning from the governing A.I. But things spiraled much quicker than we could repair it."

Magnus bent over the table and conjured his magnifying glass once more. He brought the lens over to the very edge of the map, way out into the Eclysian Depths, the deepest part of the Azure Seas. Where I expected to see endless ocean, I was met with an incredibly strange sight. A creeping darkness at the edge of the sea, water rushed to fill the space but was swallowed whole.

"What is that?" I asked dumbfounded.

"The void, or some variation of it."

I gestured at the table. "I can see that, but what's it doing there?"

"What it does best: devouring everything."

Magnus canceled his spell, and the image before me disappeared with a pop. "When the system failed, we had to make a drastic choice: sacrifice a few for the good of the many, or let the whole thing unravel. You can guess which choice we made.

“Right now, best I can tell, the damage was contained, but it destroyed most of the hard drives. Right now, we're operating on about twenty-five percent of what's left."

"So the system devoured the other continents to save space on the remaining drives?"

Magnus shook his head, holding a very forlorn and pained expression on his face. "Not just the landmasses, but NPCs, players, memories, and even history itself. Anything that was deemed non-vital."

"What?"

He cast his eyes towards with a raised brow. "Have you not wondered at the current state of things? The fact that we don't have an accurate record of history or any concrete time system?"

I coughed, turning away from the weight of his eyes on me. He expected a reasonable answer, which I didn't have. I tugged at my ponytail. "I mean, I guess I've thought about in passing, but there was always something better to occupy my time with than sitting around reading books or theorizing." There was always something else to worry about. Some new job or quest. Some dungeon to explore while I made the climb to level one hundred. I didn't have any inclination to sit still; it always brought up old memories—my past failures.

Magnus sighed at my answer before chuckling. "You and most others in this world, though I suppose it's a blessing. If too many people learned the truth, it would be chaos."

"I'm used to dealing with chaos, nothing new for me there. But this. This is beyond anything I could imagine."

Magnus was about to retort but was interrupted by Magnolia, bringing a large silver tray with a large bottle of liquor and two glasses. She set the tray down and bowed to Magnus. My mood picked up at the sight of the bottle, and I walked over and poured a too-generous measure into the glass. I knocked it back and poured another. The booze quieted my rampaging thoughts that were haunted by what I’d just been told. It was too much, way too much for me to handle, and I downed glass after glass in the hopes of finding some sense of normalcy in the world.

It didn’t work, and I got nowhere but drunk. And at this point, I'm okay with that. Damn it all to hell.

I stood off the ground, how I'd gotten