We Salute the Herald, in All of His Glory

We spend a lot of time, some of us, in front of these glowing screens, peering in from a great distance, as if attempting to scry some kind of demented future in the frothing sea of nothing that exists in the networks between your brain and mine.

Last night, I gazed into the electronic portal that held captive my very soul, that which would allow me to break free of a cycle that promised only consumption, annihilation of our true-think, a real-time strategy encased in perpetual patch notes.

The time was nigh. I clicked, hardly daring to believe in the Creator’s power to erase the forfeiture of more than a decade of handwringing, endless loss in the face of a great catastrophe, one that would embattle more than ten million bodies in a struggle for their desire to step away from a beast truly impossible to satiate, for it fed on the desire of escapism, endlessly capitulating to just-one-more-day of grinding, farming, maybe raiding – even level-ups lost in time, like dust in the winds of eternity.

But there it was.

Glinting slightly, like a cosmetic overhaul should. As if winking, understanding that there was no belief to be had. It had been many ages since hope blossomed like this. It blossomed against the tyranny of nostalgia, against the love-turned-hate of what-once-was.

I chose carefully, playfully, unwilling to believe that such sweet surrender could promise anything more than disappointment. There were dozens upon dozens of willing volunteers, promising a stroll, a joyride, a recollection of inanity blissfully free of statistics, tracked improvement, fits of desperate ALT-F4.

But there was only one true choice. I searched for it feverishly, flipping through pages of dusty tomes, each promising me the world as it was in March, 1998.

There it was. A port of the Elder Game. A custom map from Warcraft III. Herald of the Apocalypse. Destroyer of Lesser Computers. The Godson of Lag.

They used to call it Castle Fight.

I held my breath, and clicked ‘Play.’

Thirty seconds passed. I was host. It was so simple. Almost too easy. No fiddling with firewalls required, hours lost to the struggle that would never be returned. No dark hope that this machine would be a chosen one, blessed by the blizzard to lead a company of ten through the storm. All could be host.

Another thirty seconds. I was no longer alone. Another nomad had appeared, seeking the revitalization of a ghost town.

Another thirty seconds. Another soul. Sweat beaded on my forehead. The cognitive dissonance between desire and realization deepened. A voice still croaked, “You shalt not play games of old.”

But this soul knew the score. Within seconds of joining, he began to call for the kicking of my second guest.

I leaned back, away from the sparking screen. The Herald had come indeed. A decade, erased in a whirlwind of obscenities and demands to ban the Brazilian. Bliss.

We loaded the game many times that night. Pinoy pings and Slavic ISPs stalked our every 5-4-3-2-1-GO! Users failed to load. Again, and again, and again. I witnessed the passageways of time undulate, lengthen, creak painfully as they turned in on themselves.

Time itself became the circular. On the eleventh try, all loaded. Glory.

Within ten minutes, the game had become an unplayable mess of lag. All Hail. All is as it was. For we are truly fortunate.

We are reborn.