System Report

  Morning

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  For most of their stay in Ashenmoor, they had been waiting for something—anything—to happen. Preferably something exciting, like a quest, or a monster, or at the very least a dramatic revelation about one of them having been dead all along. Something that didn’t involve damp socks and the eternal, grinding sound of rain hitting poorly shingled roofs every night.

  Anything to prove they were in a dungeon and not just stuck in the kind of rain-drenched fishing village where hope goes to retire and gossip becomes a competitive sport.

  Flick, rasp, flame—snick.

  Now that something had finally arrived—dark, grim, and unfurling throughout the night like a damp carpet of destiny—they wanted none of it. They already knew how this story ended. They’d seen it, done it, and in one unfortunate case, lost a limb over it.

  Mari sat slumped in her chair, staring at her hands as though waiting for them to confess to something. Her Third Eye—usually hovering behind her head in an unnerving sort of way—rested meekly in her lap. It, much like her, looked like a single sigh away from toppling over completely, which would have been pitiful if anyone had the energy left to notice.

  Desmond had abandoned the pretense of dignity entirely. He was curled in the corner, rocking back and forth like a man trying to hypnotize himself into a different reality. Between hiccupped breaths, he muttered about how he wouldn’t do it, how his arm was gone (“his bloody arm,” which was technically accurate), and how this was all a mistake.

  One might have thought him mad, but the others had seen what he’d seen, and madness seemed more like a reasonable career choice than an affliction at this point.

  Flick, rasp, flame—snick.

  Even Alana—who had a propensity for weaponizing anger as a kind of renewable energy—was running on fumes. Several of her bandages had turned from white to a very honest sort of red where she leaned against the window frame, staring out into the dark, knife balanced loosely in her hand as though contemplating who to stab. That bastard shop-owner? The next person to speak up? Herself? Or maybe just Fate, if she could get close enough to it.

  Yenna wasn’t much better off herself. Technically, she was the only one of them who’d gotten anything resembling rest that night, but only in the same way that a man thrown from a galloping horse can technically be said to have “landed.”

  Flick, rasp, flame—

  It hadn’t felt like sleep. It had felt like dying and then realizing death had a return policy. Even now, everything seemed oddly distant, as though she were a ghost renting her own body for a short stay. The shop, the air, even her fingers—they all felt like props on the wrong stage.

  The only part of her that seemed to be operating properly was a callous, rational part of her brain—the part that takes over when everything else has gone off to have a small nervous breakdown. It told her, quite sensibly, that she could contemplate her existence when survival wasn’t looming over their heads.

  “There’s no other way, is there?” she asked, raising her head to look at Edrik Kain as a final snick shut the brass lighter in her hands.

  Ever since he finished his story, the ancient artificer had, to all outward appearances, maintained the physical robustness of an elderly umbrella in a thunderstorm. Shivering, frail, and seeming just a moment of misfortune away from snapping in half.

  Even so, he had been the first among them to move.

  While the rest of them sat like the condemned awaiting the sentence, Edrik shuffled about the wreckage of the Clatterwane. What had once been smoking and sizzling debris now sagged and dripped, the generous contributions of a rain that had decided to pay a visit through shattered windows.

  But Edrik didn’t seem to mind. He shuffled through the remnants of his shop and home, picking up books, tools, and strange bits of metal that looked like they belonged to another century—or another reality—entirely. He would mutter something incomprehensible, shake his head, and tuck any survivors of his inspection into a satchel already giving up under the weight of his optimism.

  “Either we go out there and stop whatever the townsfolk are doing,” Yenna continued, the silence having begun to feel accusatory, “or we die trying.”

  Once more, the elderly artificer didn’t bother to reply. He didn’t need to.

  Hovering before them, glowing in that faintly smug way that all System notices seem to glow, was the only answer they could ever need:

  WARNING! The townsfolk fear Her return and are doing everything in their power to prevent it.

  Reach the church and stop them before it is too late.

  00:43:21…

  00:43:20…

  You can debate gods, you can cheat death, and you can occasionally reason with an eldritch horror if you bring snacks, but a System timer? No chance. The System was fair, yes. “Fair” in the same way that gravity is fair—it treats everyone equally right up until the moment it kills you. But fairness wasn’t a coin with only one side. The other side was compliance.

  If the scenario said move, then you moved. If it said fight, then you fought. There was no third option labelled “have a nice cup of tea and think this over.” Not if you treasured your life.

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  “I’m not going,” Desmond whimpered from his corner. “I’m done with this place. All of it.”

  Mari, who looked as though she was being held together by willpower, wire, and one particularly stubborn thread of sanity, tightened her grip around her skill construct. “We need to go,” she said softly, as though speaking too loudly might make the words less true. “We need to, or we’ll end up…”

  Whatever she’d meant to say—dead, gone, part of the décor—evaporated halfway out of her mouth. So, she finished, weakly, “or this will all have been for nothing. We have to—”

  “We don’t have to do anything!” Desmond shouted, into his only remaining hand, into the dripping air, into the waiting silence. The words came out raw and ragged; the kind of sound that wanted to crawl back into the throat it came from. “We’re going to die! We’re going to die like dogs. Just like Alex, Gami, Jodi, and—”

  The sharp thunk of a dagger embedded itself into the wall besides his head like a punctuation mark.

  “Then how about I finish you off here and now?” said Alana, walking over to retrieve her dagger with the air of someone fully intent on following through on the offer. “That way, at least the rest of us won’t have to listen to your damned whining.”

  She violently yanked it free, never breaking eye contact with the boy. Desmond didn’t answer. He just folded in on himself, a small, shivering monument to the power of self-pity.

  Alana turned to the others, her eyes dark and ringed like the moons after a bad night but still burning. “I’m not going to die here. That’s for certain. I’m getting out of this gods-forsaken hole, with or without the rest of you. So—” her gaze landed on Yenna, “—are you coming or not?”

  She said it like a challenge, the kind of tone that suggested a “no” might result in another dagger being used for emphasis.

  “I am,” Yenna replied, with the calculated calm of someone trying not to entice a starving predator. “I just… I just need a moment to think…”

  Flick, rasp, flame—

  It wasn’t even a lie. She had been thinking. About Ashenmoor. About Kain’s story. About Overlords, the System, Delvers, survival—and herself. Too many questions, and not nearly enough time. Even if her mind felt as if it was working at twice its usual speed, “twice as fast” only helped if there weren’t ten times as many problems.

  She looked down at her hands, flexing them experimentally. They clenched, unclenched, and then sat there looking guiltily useless. Could she do what she’d done earlier? Probably not. Back then, when the shop was caught in a storm of blood, screams and chaos, the Clatterwane had been humming with energy. Now it was dead. No matter how much she searched, no matter how much she looked for the spark she’d felt back then, there was nothing.

  The clocks had stopped. The trinkets were silent. Even the air had that heavy, post-miracle quiet. The only thing humming was the rain in the rafters.

  No more flukes, then. No more borrowed miracles.

  And without them—

  “The answers will find you when you need them, child,” said Edrik Kain, his voice pulling her back like a hand tugging at the sleeve of the drowning. “Now, however, is not the time. Time is fleeting.”

  —snick.

  Yenna blinked up to see the old artificer standing before her, satchel extended with hands that trembled, though whether from age, exhaustion, or the burden of knowing things, it was hard to tell. Or maybe it was the satchel itself, weighed down by things not bound by just the physical plane.

  Inside, she could sense faint echoes of those power-nodes that’d once been abundant in the Clatterwane: tiny pulses of potential, half-asleep and mumbling to themselves. But there were other things as well—objects that thought in their own small, secret ways. Whispers and murmurs. Tools that wanted to talk back.

  Things she didn’t understand.

  “This will help you some part of the way,” Kain continued. “The rest, you’ll have to work out for yourself. Now go. Go, before you’re left behind. You are not strong enough to make it out alone. None of you are. Maybe not even together…”

  Yenna barely noticed his fading words as she, with a sudden jolt of guilt, realized that her “moment to think” had stretched on far longer than she’d intended.

  Time, it seemed, had nearly moved on without her.

  Only Desmond’s soft sobbing filled the ruined shop now, joined by the persistent drumming of rain and the occasional protest of a door that refused to stay shut. Outside, voices carried through the hiss of downpour: one razor-edged and furious, the other small and hesitant.

  “Leave them!” came Alana’s words—sharp enough to cut through thunder. “If they want to stay here and rot away, let them! By all means, join them as well—I don’t care! I’m not going to die in this gods-forsaken hole, that’s all I know!”

  Through the fogged, rain-streaked window, she saw Alana’s shadow wheel around and stride off into the dreary morning—though “morning” was an optimistic term for a slightly paler shade of night. Mari stood a moment longer, drenched, bewildered, and dripping with indecision. Then she glanced back toward the shop—toward Yenna.

  As their eyes met through the window, relief crossed the girl’s face like a sunrise that wasn’t quite sure it was welcome. With a quick series of gestures—something that Yenna optimistically translated as “I’ll try to make her wait” rather than “Good luck, we’re doomed”—Mari hurried after Alana, splashing down the street.

  With another sting of guilt, Yenna’s gaze caught the edge of the hovering display in her vision. The numbers had dropped again, further than she’d realized, busily counting away the moments as if they were on sale.

  00:22:04…

  The timer was bleeding out, one second at a time. Not quickly, not dramatically—just steadily, the way sand leaves an hourglass or hope leaves a hospital room.

  Even so, it was with a hint of hesitation that Yenna rose from her chair, taking the satchel from Kain’s trembling hands. “Despite everything…” she began, “you still think following the System’s commands is the right thing to do?”

  Kain gave a small, rasping laugh—half scoff, half wheezed breath, and just a touch of fatalism. “You’re asking the wrong man, my dear. I’ve doubted that thing my whole life, and yet I never once managed to resist it. It’s rather like gravity in that respect. You can object all you like, but eventually, you’re still going down.”

  He coughed, harshly. The sort of cough that had conclusions.

  When he spoke again, blood trickled down his lips.

  “But the Core I knew is not the same that calls you,” he said, voice softer now. “So, who knows? Just remember—nothing comes for free. Not knowledge. Not power. And certainly not second chances. Everything costs something, and sometimes… Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. In the name of survival. In the name of progress.”

  He paused, drew a shuddering breath, and added, “And nothing, absolutely nothing, is more costly than hesitation.”

  Letting the satchel’s strap slide over her shoulder, Yenna could feel its weight settle like responsibility—solid, awkward, and not at all optional. She glanced toward Desmond, still huddled in his misery.

  “We were never meant to survive,” she murmured. “Not all of us.”

  Kain gave a faint nod, and for a moment the light in his tired eyes seemed to come from somewhere distant—somewhere deep inside. “We are all just cogs in its great machinery,” he said quietly. “The best we can do is turn twice when required. Become indispensable or be discarded.”

  Outside, the rain fell harder, as though the world itself was trying to wash the notion away—and finding, as usual, that it was entirely futile.