The machines grind lines of code in the dark. We are calibrating the import scripts to haul relics from the digital mud, and among the first ghosts to stand up from the dust is Forsaken. One of those derelicts that encrusts your soul and will not leave. Grifis harbors a mute and unyielding obsession for it.

I was talking to him earlier. He said that amid the useless clamor of a concert a melody crept into his head and dragged him dead weight back to the ruthless days of the first World of Warcraft. Back to when I was a druid and he a warrior and we descended into Onyxia’s lair to break our bones against the fire. It was a perfect thing. It was no pastime to kill the hours of an empty day. It was a raw and real thing and it stayed there. Carved like a scar upon our lives.

And I twist the knife in the wound of memory and bring up Jackie from Cyberpunk. A brother born under the neon and left dead on the dirty blacktop. The definitive bro. When he closed his eyes for good in that armored transport it was not a string of code fading away. It was genuine grief. We were left deadened, in silence. Staring at the screen the way a man stares into the bottom of an open grave.

That is the way of it. These false worlds continue to walk beside you in the waking present, but they hollow out memories inside you that the life out there can only dream of. For us, who grew up in the stale air of old garages warmed only by the radioactive glow of a cathode tube with an NES lashed to it with tangled cords, it was a time without price.

And there is a certain bitter irony in watching the new blood today stumble over those same rusted scraps. To see them rediscover how beautiful and merciless the games of the past were. Hard and bastardly in their absolute lack of pity. Simply naked. In a world where everything, both in here and out there, has gone goddamn soft.

And tonight we will take a bottle into the dark and drink to Jackie. We will pour a measure of liquor into the dirt in a dark and pagan sacrament for the fallen, for the veil is thin and the dead are never truly gone. And the stars will wheel above us in their cold and ancient alignments drawing the old sigils across the black vault of the night. The universe itself pausing its blind machinery to stand vigil with us in the void. Bearing silent witness to two men raising a glass to a brother forged of light and sorrow.