lonely warriors across space and time

Keleyna of Azeroth

Keleyna awoke in a small tent. Or was this something other than waking? Somehow she knew that it had not been hours or even days since she had stepped into the tent, but ten months. It was as if she had nearly phased out of existence, as if she were part of someone else’s dream and had been all but forgotten. She thought the sudden sensation of reawakening—re-existing—after so long was not unlike plummeting into a pool of icy water.

Dazed and unsteady on her feet, she emerged from the tent to a familiar sight. Yes, this Alliance fort in the Barrens was the last place she remembered, and seemingly nothing had changed. She stumbled over to a smiling, stationary gnome, Mizzy Pistonhammer, who it seemed was still patiently waiting for the eight pieces of siege engine scrap she’d asked Keleyna to collect for her ten months ago. The distant sound of explosions told her that goblin suicide bombers were still steadily charging the battlements. Gods, this world seemed so resistant to change, the constant conflict as pointless as it was endless.

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Still, as she left Fort Triumph to go do something, anything, she remembered that she loved the Barrens. A phrase formed in her mind: “Lonely as I am, together we cry.” She didn’t know where it came from—a fragment of a mostly-forgotten song, perhaps—but whatever the source, it seemed fitting. In a world where her actions so often seemed insignificant, there was something oddly comforting about the forthright way in which the Barrens seemed to say to her, Yes, you ARE small, just one little, tiny part of this vast world, this mysterious universe. There was a spiritual comfort in the sparseness of it all, the heat of the dry, cracking earth a balm for her loneliness.

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A balm, but not a cure. When she’d last gone to sleep all those months ago she felt a troubling void inside of herself, a persistent lack of purpose or meaning to all of her questing. She couldn’t recall any dreams from the deep sleep into which she’d fallen, but if she’d had any, they clearly hadn’t offered any answers.

Keleyna decided to see if she could be of service to the dwarves at Bael Modan, and when Marley Twinbraid asked her to retrieve his tools from the nearby digsite, she immediately set herself to the task, as much to distract herself from the troubling thoughts and feelings she couldn’t shake as anything else. It wasn’t long until she returned with the tools in hand, which Twinbraid promptly used to repair his flying machine. He entreated Keleyna to join him for a quick flight to his father’s nearby camp, but shortly after liftoff, a massive explosion shook the air around the contraption, and they went plummeting toward the earth.

Walking away from the wreckage unscathed, Keleyna wondered if she shouldn’t be a bit shaken up about what had just happened, but somehow she knew she hadn’t been in any real danger, nothing had been at stake. This was just a bit of fun, an adventure, a chapter in a story that couldn’t really hurt her, no matter what happened. But, then, what was the point? People didn’t usually go to Disneyland alone and ride the rides by themselves, she thought. The magic wasn’t in Pirates of the Caribbean itself; it was in making memories together. It was in holding hands on the ride. It was in going to the Blue Bayou Restaurant with people you loved right afterwards, your spirits buoyed by your shared experience. Wait, what’s Disneyland?

She’d heard rumors that soon, through some sort of arcane magicks, adventurers who so desired would be able to return to the way things had been long ago, before the great cataclysm remade the world. Some said that what had made things better then was that people were friendlier, that they adventured together more, they cooperated more, they talked more. Keleyna definitely felt the absence of these things in her adventures. She’d recently had the eerie experience of venturing through a dungeon with others, nobody saying a word to each other the entire time, and when it was over, they all parted silently, as immaterial to each other as phantoms.

She couldn’t say if things had been better back then. She hadn’t even existed. But she seemed to carry with her the vague memories of a night elf druid who had existed back then, someone who was somehow both her and not her. When she examined the place in herself where those memories resided, she saw some warm recollections of fellowship, but also some frustration and bitterness, as the druid quickly fell behind those she’d called friends, lacked the experience needed to journey alongside them any longer, and found herself feeling lonely and left out.

Keleyna imagined a goblin zeppelin drifting across the sky, blaring a repeating announcement: “A new life awaits you in World of Warcraft Classic! The chance to begin again in a golden age of opportunity and adventure.” She’d heard some big proponents of Classic, as the land through the portals was called, use the slogan “Make Azeroth Great Again,” a phrase she found repellant, though she couldn’t articulate exactly why. Maybe it was just that people who held romanticized notions of the past tended to be hostile to people different from  themselves in the present.

She hated the war. She desperately wished that the Alliance and Horde could put aside their differences once and for all, and learn to coexist. She even sometimes felt that the Alliance might well be the more unjust and oppressive of the two, though she couldn’t say that out loud, of course. In her mind, the only real hope was to create a new future that looked like nothing the peoples of Azeroth had ever seen before, not to go back to the earlier years of this relentless conflict. But she was also willing to try just about anything at this point. If there was even a chance that the togetherness she longed for would be waiting on the other side of those portals to the past, then why not make the leap?

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The portals hadn’t been opened just yet, though, and while the warm empty vastness of the Barrens had been a welcome comfort, it couldn’t stave off the feelings that sapped her will from within for long. Craving a change of scenery, she hopped a gryphon to Theramore Isle, the sturdy trees and salty sea air a welcome change from the dry heat of the Barrens. She entered the inn and felt a pang in her heart at the sight of its emptiness. Weren’t inns like this supposed to be places where adventurers connected, sharing tales of their latest quests over flagons of mead? With a heavy sigh, she sat down, wondering when she might reawaken, or if this time, she might slip out of the world’s dreams forever. 

—–

Many miles away, something flies from the surface of a blue marbled sphere…

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—–

The Guardian, Milky Way Galaxy, sometime in the future

She had a name, of course, though nobody knew it but herself. People just called her The Guardian. There were other guardians, of course–tons of them–but if you just said “The Guardian,” everybody knew you were talking about her. After all, she was the one who had done that one big thing, and then, later, she’d done that other big thing, too. She couldn’t actually tell you what those things were that she had done or why exactly they’d mattered so much, but the Vanguard clearly relied on her to take care of the biggest problems that came along. Oh, and she’d avenged Cayde’s death. That, at least, had been an adventure she’d more or less understood, and she’d liked Cayde a lot, but she didn’t feel great about revenge as a motivator. Still, her options had been to do that or to not do anything, so she’d done that, too.

Everyone knew of her, but nobody knew her. When she walked past the ramen shop in the Tower, the people at the counter would talk in hushed whispers, wondering what the Guardian really fought for, and if this woman who had done so much for so many others had anything, anyone, in her own life. Or at least, the Guardian liked to think that this was true. It was her own personal headcanon. The world hadn’t given her what felt like a meaningful story, so she created one herself. She was a legend in her own mind. Sure, she’d fought alongside other guardians a handful of times, guardians she’d known and felt safe with, and those times had been, by far, the most enjoyable and meaningful of her adventures. But those guardians had disappeared without a trace, long, long ago. Now, she knew she could team up with other guardians at random, but she would never do that. She had strong defenses up, and with good reason. Too many bad experiences, too many painful memories.

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So she worked alone. It was something to do, but it felt empty. She’d go on missions and get some gear that raised her light level a bit. It was tangible progress, but to what end? So that she could go on more missions and get more gear that raised her light level a bit? Was this all there was?

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She looked up at the Traveler, that mysterious being, a fusion of magic and technology that hinted at possibilities beyond this life of guns and blood, and wondered if anything stirred inside of it. She wondered if there actually was more than this, or if this was all there was. She wondered what it was all for, and figured that people had been looking to the sky and wondering this for as long as there had been people, so at least in this, at least in feeling alone and lost and uncertain, she was connected to everyone who had come before. But that was cold comfort as she climbed into her little single-seater starship and set out for The Tangled Shore in hopes of finding a better pair of gauntlets.

—–

“I wake up scared, I wake up strange, and everything around me stays the same.”

–BNL, “What a Good Boy

—–

Carolyn, Berkeley

Here I am, the link between these two characters, projecting all my own doubt and dissatisfaction onto them.

Things are up in the air right now, Unstructured. Scary. The one constant is that I’m steadfastly working on a long-term project that’s quite unlike anything I’ve done before. It requires a lot more planning. I know where it’s going. I mean, I don’t know exactly what turn it’s going to take at every crossroads, but I have a map to the final destination. There’s comfort in this, but it also means that this writing comes from a different place than so much of the writing I’ve done. I believe in it. I feel good about it. I like doing it and knowing that I’m capable of doing it. But also, it’s safer, less emotionally urgent. (Whether or not it will ever see the light of day, now that is a question of some urgency, as it’s not exactly pulling in any money just yet, but that’s a different matter.) That project aside, lately I’ve felt like I’m looking for a reason to write. The pinprick, the provocation, the punch in the face. The things I usually find in life and in art, and in the space between myself and the games I play.

Destiny 2 and World of Warcraft don’t give me those reasons. So why do I keep returning to them, when whatever comforts they offer are fleeting, when they leave me feeling as empty as when I started? Why, when I’m so desperate for connection, do I keep playing alone these games that are designed to be played together? Why don’t I take the hours that these games swallow up and use them to read a book? Is it because I think that at any moment, something may change? Is it because I know that, while a book may be far more worthwhile, I won’t find the connection I crave in its pages, either?

I want games that fuck me up. The first episode of Stories Untold, man, that fucked me up. My brain buzzed for a few hours afterwards with the excitement and stimulation of having played something truly surprising. Destiny, WoW, these games might be fun if I had people to play them with, but the one thing they will never be, especially not as long as I play them on my own, is surprising. I know exactly what I’m in for each time I fire them up. And yet I do it again and again and again.

Here’s why I think I keep coming back: Because in this moment, when my life feels so uncertain and terrifying, I know for certain that in those worlds I can succeed, that after an hour or two, the numbers that define my character will be a little bit higher than they were when I started. Things feel so out of my control right now. Here’s a place where I can have a kind of control, however small, however empty.  

But games can’t be the answer. Life has to be. A few shallow, friendly connections won’t cut it, whether it’s people I hang out with but don’t really know in the real world, or people I run dungeons with in WoW but never really talk to or touch. As Olivia Laing so perceptively writes in The Lonely City, “[L]oneliness is hallmarked by an intense desire to bring the experience to a close; something which cannot be achieved by sheer willpower or by simply getting out more, but only by developing intimate connections.”

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Or, as Bruce Springsteen sang,

I’m dying for some action
I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book
I need a love reaction
Come on now baby gimme just one look

Because that’s where life is. That’s where the reason to write is. That’s where the reason to play is. You take what life gives you and you bring it to those things. But if life isn’t giving you the stuff of life, what, then, do you do?

I don’t want to be a warrior anymore, or at least not a lonely one. I don’t want the Boba Fett mystique. When I was younger I thought maybe I did, but now I know I don’t. Keleyna and the Guardian don’t come from anywhere, they sprang into the world fully formed as adults with no past, no family, no history, but I want someone to know where I come from. They quest alone, or when they do team up with others, it’s a fully superficial affair, no words exchanged, no lasting connection. I want to go on adventures with someone who takes on my complexity and lets me into theirs, someone I can have a real conversation with at the end of a long week, someone to walk around a real city with, someone I want to be there for and who wants to be there for me.

It’s not that I want to stop playing. Not at all. I just want the flame to be reignited. I want something to hold onto, something I can bring back to my time with the controller to make it all mean something. I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book.

—–

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