Time had become unreliable. The sun had moved. Whether it had moved minutes or hours, the slime could not determine. The grey body sat on the stone beside the body that had stopped being a person, and the wind blew across the mountainside, and the slime's internal clock, which had never been precise, had broken along with everything else.

  The first to move was the large one.

  He approached the slime. His footsteps were heavy, deliberate, carrying the vibration of a person who is walking toward something they intend to confront. The slime felt him coming. Felt the emotional color that preceded him like heat from an open furnace.

  Red. Anger. Pure, uncomplicated, directed. The red of a person who has identified a cause for something terrible and is orienting all of his confusion and grief toward that cause because confusion and grief are unbearable and anger is simple.

  His vibrations were low. Hot. Not the warmth that the slime's body responded to. The heat of combustion. Of something being burned. The shape of the sounds he produced was a question, but the temperature was an accusation. The two-syllable name was not in it. The function-word was not in it. What was in it was the vibration pattern for you and the vibration pattern for why and the vibration pattern for a thing the slime could not parse but whose temperature was the temperature of blame.

  [Emotion Sense] confirmed: anger. Only anger. This was the man who had been healed in the second layer when the venom was eating through his side. This was the man whose arm the slime had mended in the fight with the armored creatures. This was the man who had never once directed an emotional color at the slime that was not grey indifference, and who now directed at it nothing but red. The healings were not in his colors. The debt was not in his calculations. Only the deficit. Only the failure. Only the single moment when the slime had not performed, weighed against nothing.

  The tall one approached behind him. His emotional color was different. Blue-white. Fear. The same fear-color that had dominated the body's final moments, but from a different source and aimed at a different target. The tall one was afraid of the slime. Not of its size or its power. Afraid of what it represented: a thing that could heal and had chosen not to. A creature that had watched a person die while holding the light that could have prevented it. The tall one had noticed, across the months, the changes that the others had not. He had started protests that died in his throat. He had seen. And now he was afraid of the thing that the seeing had produced.

  His vibrations carried the shape of the same question. The temperature was not hot. It was cold. The cold of someone who does not want to understand the answer but cannot stop themselves from asking.

  The slime did not respond. Could not. The body sat on the stone, grey and still, and the red and the blue-white washed over it, and the slime perceived them the way it perceived all things: completely, precisely, and without the capacity to answer.

  The large one stepped forward. His vibration intensified. Closer. Louder. The red deepening toward something that might have become violence if it were aimed at a target that could be struck meaningfully. The tall one's hand reached out. Caught the large one's arm. Pulled. A short, gruff vibration. The temperature of stop. enough. we go.

  The large one resisted for a moment. Then turned. Walked away from the slime, his anger trailing behind him like smoke.

  ***

  The soft-handed one did not move with the others.

  She stood where she had been standing since the body fell. A few paces from the slime. Close enough for [Emotion Sense] to read her at full resolution. Close enough for every shade, every thread, every complexity of her emotional state to register in the slime's perception.

  Dark blue. Grief. The deep, saturated blue of genuine loss, the color of a person mourning a death that she had not been able to prevent and had known, on some level, was coming. The blue went all the way down. It was not surface grief. It was the grief of someone who had watched the trajectory from the beginning and had seen the end from a long way off and had not been able to alter the course.

  Quiet water-blue. Understanding.

  The slime felt the understanding in her colors the way a person feels a hand on their shoulder in the dark. Not the hot understanding of someone who comprehends and judges. Not the cold understanding of someone who comprehends and withdraws. A still, sad understanding. The understanding of a person who had asked are you tired? and had been answered with silence, and had opened her mouth to protest and had been cut off, and had apologized and had been met with gratitude she did not deserve, and had raised her voice once and had achieved nothing, and had packed extra supplies because she knew the primary plan would fail, and had watched all of it and understood more than anyone else in the party and had not been able to translate that understanding into action that changed anything.

  She understood why the slime had not healed.

  Not completely. Not in the precise sequence of emotional events that had led from the palm to the pack to the ground to the stillness beside the dying body. But in the shape of it. In the outline. She understood that a thing had been used until it broke, and that the breaking had happened in a place that was invisible, and that the moment the breaking became visible was the moment the body needed the thing most, and that the coincidence of those two events was not a coincidence at all but a consequence.

  Her mouth moved.

  The slime's core pulsed. A faint, involuntary response. The body remembered. This was the presence whose vibrations had always carried warmth. The only presence that had consistently turned toward the slime with colors that were not grey or yellow or red. The core pulsed because it could not help pulsing, because the mechanism that responded to care still functioned even now, even in the grey, even after everything.

  The mouth closed.

  She did not speak.

  The understanding remained in her colors. The grief deepened. And a third color emerged, threading through the blue and the water-blue: dark green. Guilt. The guilt of a person who understands and says nothing. The guilt of a person who could explain, who could step between the slime and the anger and the fear and say wait, listen, there is more to this than you see, and does not. Not because she is cruel. Not because she does not care. Because the thing she understands is too large and too tangled and too impossible to reduce to words that would change anything, and because speaking would mean standing in a space she is not brave enough to occupy, and because silence, in the end, is easier than the truth.

  She turned. Walked toward the others. They were constructing something from branches. A frame. A carrying structure. For the body that had been a person.

  Her footsteps receded. The slime tracked them. Tracked the diminishing intensity of her emotional colors as the distance increased. Dark blue, water-blue, dark green. Fading. Fading. The way colors fade at dusk, not by disappearing but by becoming indistinguishable from the surrounding dark.

  The three of them lifted the frame. The body was on it. The body that had named the slime and then un-named it. They began to walk. Down the mountain. Away.

  No one came back for the slime.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The soft-handed one turned once. At the point where the path curved around an outcropping of stone. She turned and looked back at the slime, and the slime felt the last pulse of her water-blue understanding reach across the distance like a hand extended too late and from too far away to touch.

  Then the path took her around the stone, and the colors disappeared from [Emotion Sense]'s range, and the slime was alone.

  ***

  The mountain. The wind. The stone.

  [Emotion Sense] swept the perimeter and returned nothing. No colors. No vectors. No warmth, no cold, no anger, no fear, no understanding, no guilt. The natural world did not produce emotional signatures. Wind had no color. Stone had no intention. The sun, which was warm on the slime's grey body, carried no feeling in its warmth.

  The slime knew this silence.

  The cave. The colony. The wall where it had thrown itself against the stone and waited for signals that never came back. The chamber where every other slime had been a closed system, producing nothing that the slime's different architecture could receive. The isolation that had been the slime's first and most fundamental experience of the world.

  The cave had been the beginning. And the beginning was here again. The same silence. The same absence. The same quality of being alive in a space where nothing alive was oriented toward you.

  But in the cave, there had been a direction. Out. Toward the light at the entrance. Toward the world where warm things lived. The cave had been terrible, but the cave had contained the possibility of leaving, and the possibility of leaving had been enough to sustain the slime through the loneliness because somewhere out there, beyond the stone, there were hands and voices and colors.

  The slime had left the cave. The slime had found the hands and the voices and the colors. The slime had been named and carried and called by a word that was warm. And the hands had become mechanical and the voice had become a command and the colors had become yellow and grey and the word had disappeared and the name had become a function and the function had become a silence and the silence had become a death and the death had become this.

  The slime was on a mountain with no direction. No out. No cave to leave. No world to enter. The cave had been behind it and the world had been in front of it and now both were the same thing and the slime sat in the center of neither and the wind blew and nothing changed.

  The body trembled. Not from cold. From the inside.

  ***

  The slime began to move.

  Not away from the place. Toward the place. Toward the stain on the stone where the body's blood had pooled and dried. The stain was dark. Almost black in the afternoon light. The shape of it was irregular, following the contours of the rock, and the slime moved toward it with the slow, deliberate locomotion of a creature performing an act whose purpose it does not understand.

  The slime reached the stain. Positioned itself beside it. The stone was cold. The blood was dry.

  The core glowed.

  [Heal].

  Blue-white light, thin and stuttering, emerged from the cracked core and fell on the bloodstain. The light illuminated the dark surface. The light did what [Heal] always did: it searched for damage and attempted to repair it. It found no living tissue. It found no wound. It found dried blood on stone, and the light washed over it and did nothing, and the light faded, and the stain remained.

  [Heal].

  Again. The core protested. The fracture ached. The light emerged, weaker, and fell on the same stone, and searched for the same damage, and found the same nothing, and faded.

  [Heal]. [Heal]. [Heal].

  The slime repeated. Each activation drew from reserves that were nearly gone, converting structural energy into light that landed on stone and accomplished nothing. The core flickered with each attempt. The body shrank. The grey deepened. And the slime kept going, kept activating, kept directing the light at the place where the body had been, because [Heal] was the only thing the slime had ever been able to do, and the slime could not speak and could not scream and could not run and could not fight and could not explain, and [Heal] was the only language it possessed, and the only thing left to say with it was this: the light, falling on nothing, over and over, the way a voice calls a name into an empty room knowing the room is empty and calling anyway because the alternative to calling is accepting the emptiness and the emptiness cannot be accepted, not yet, not yet.

  The reserves ran out. The core dimmed. The last activation of [Heal] began and could not complete, the light gathering at the surface and then collapsing inward, a sentence started and never finished.

  The slime's body flickered. Blue, grey. Blue, grey. The two colors that had defined the slime's existence: the blue of what it had been, of the cave and the bat and the palm and the name and the gold. The grey of what it had become, of the pack and the ground and the demand and the zero and the death. The two colors alternated, faster and faster, and then slower, and then the blue lost its contest with the grey, and the flickering stopped, and the grey settled, and the slime was still.

  ***

  Stillness. Long.

  The sun moved. Afternoon light stretched across the mountainside, pulling shadows from the rocks. The bloodstain darkened further as the angle changed. The wind continued.

  The slime moved. Away from the stain. Toward the edge of the slope. Toward down. The basic locomotion pattern, contraction and expansion, carrying the small grey body across the stone at the pace of something that has nowhere to go and is going anyway.

  Was I wrong?

  The thought arrived without force. Flat. Grey.

  Is it my fault he died? Because I didn't heal him?

  Or is it the fault of the person who made me into something that couldn't?

  The questions had no answers. The questions might never have answers. The questions were the same shape as the turbulence in the body's final colors: unresolvable. Permanent. A weight that would not decrease with time because the information needed to resolve it had died with the person whose colors had been too chaotic to read.

  I don't know. I don't know anything.

  The slime moved down the slope. Between stones. Through grass. Slow.

  But...

  ...being this lonely...

  ...is better than being beside someone who made me feel lonelier.

  A long pause. The slime continued moving. The mountain below it was vast, and the path was not a path, and the direction was not a direction, and the slime followed the gradient of the slope because gravity was the only force that offered guidance and gravity did not care where it led.

  ...really?

  The word echoed inside the core. The body remembered the palm. Thirty-six degrees. The body remembered the fire and the night and the gold that had been real. The body remembered that there had been a time when the word warm was not a memory but a fact, and the fact was present, and the present was good, and the good was something the slime had wanted to live inside forever.

  The slime could not say that loneliness was better. The slime could not say that companionship was better. The slime could only say that both contained pain, and the pain was different, and the difference was not enough to constitute an answer.

  The slime descended. The sun angled toward evening. The grey body moved across the rock, smaller than a palm, cracked, silent, carrying inside it a light that still worked and a question that did not, and the mountain did not notice it, and the wind did not notice it, and the world continued in the way that worlds continue when very small things are suffering very quietly within them.

  ***

  Partway down the mountain. The light shifting toward amber. The air warmer at the lower altitude.

  The slime's perception flickered. Not [Emotion Sense]. Something else. Something internal. A notification, unbidden, surfacing in the slime's awareness the way System notifications had always surfaced: without invitation, without warmth, without context.

  Name: Luca

  Species: Slime (Variant - Heal Type)

  Disposition: Gentle

  Skills:

  [Heal Lv.7] [Absorb Lv.1] [Emotion Sense Lv.3]

  Trust: ████████████? [CRACKED]

  The slime regarded the display. The bar was nearly full. The bar had always been full. Trust in humans, measured and quantified and rendered as a visual element by the System that governed this world's rules, had been at maximum since the day the slime climbed onto a warm palm and decided that the world outside the cave was worth trusting.

  The bar was still nearly full. But across its surface, a fracture ran. A visible line of damage in the representation, mirroring the fracture in the core, mirroring the fracture in the thing the slime had believed about the world and the people in it.

  [CRACKED].

  Not broken. Not empty. Not reduced. Cracked. The trust was still there. The trust was still high. But the surface through which the trust was expressed had been damaged, and the damage was visible, and the System had registered it, and the registration meant that the change was not merely felt but real, encoded in the architecture of the world itself.

  The slime looked at the display. The slime felt nothing about the display. The grey body on the mountainside regarded the quantification of its own damage with the flat, exhausted neutrality of a creature that has passed through the territory of feeling and arrived on the other side, where the landscape is featureless and the light is even and nothing requires a response.

  The display faded.

  The slime continued down the mountain.

  Grey. Small. Alone. Carrying a light that could heal anything except the place it came from, and a trust that was cracked but not broken, and a question that would follow it into whatever came next, and the memory of a palm that had been warm, and the knowledge that the warmth was gone, and the inability to decide whether the warmth had been worth the cost of losing it.

  The evening settled over the mountain. The slime descended. The world was very large, and the slime was very small, and the distance between those two facts was the entirety of what remained.

  End of Part One.

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