Gremlin Status: Unknown

  System Report:

  The Day the Bells Tolled

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  Rain slid down the windows like a depressed snail with nowhere better to be. Three weeks of meteorological sulking, and the skies over Ashenmoor showed no sign of cheering up. Ever since their arrival, the fog had persisted like a lodger who never intended to pay rent, and the drizzle—steady, patient, and profoundly irritating—had made itself the landlord. Not the dramatic sort either, the kind that slammed down onto roofs looking for what it was owed, it was the kind that just seeped—into clothing, into bones, and quite possibly into the soul, if one stayed too long without a decent umbrella.

  Inside Clatterwane’s Tinkers & Temporals, Gami watched the droplets chart their course down the windowpane.

  She held a brass lighter in her hand and flicked it with metronomic resolve. Every few seconds: flick, rasp, flame—snick. It was hypnotic. Where she came from—a world far from the damp clutches of Ashenmoor—they used friction-stones and glow-rods, both reliable and deeply unromantic ways of sparking fire. In comparison, the lighter was a marvel. Had been, at least.

  Now, after weeks of terminal boredom, it was just something to do while trying very hard not to remember she was still stuck in this place.

  The shop itself—crammed into one of the town’s less advertised alleys—was a concert of aimless genius. Gears ticked. Pistons sighed. Steam whooshed from improbable apertures. Somewhere in the rafters, something mechanical muttered to itself in Old Binary. It was the sort of place that attracted wonder—until wonder, too, grew damp and mildewed.

  Outside, shadows drifted past the misted window like half-remembered thoughts.

  Gami watched them with the wary focus of someone who didn’t trust streets that whispered behind your back. She hadn’t liked the town on the first day. By the fourth, it had worn out its unwelcome. Every creaking weather vane, every boot squelch, every eery gaze that seemed to be conspiring in some unspoken plot. One that included her, whether she liked it or not.

  Another flick of the lighter. Ching went the spark wheel, cheerful as ever. But the accompanying clack of the cap—so punctual, so reliable—failed to turn up.

  From somewhere in the back of the shop, the steady scrape scrape scrape of metal on metal faltered and died.

  Yenna looked up from her latest contraption, one eye still squinting through a magnifying lens that gave her the appearance of a very earnest insect. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Their decision had been to help Edrik Kain, made in the town square, under duress, mild rain, and the presence of unsettling gazes. Now, three weeks and a handful of side-quests later, the secrets of Ashenmoor remained frustratingly un-unveiled, but Yenna had acquired something marginally more practical: the beginnings of a new profession and the permanent scent of solder.

  Upstairs, her mentor’s cough rattled the floorboards in the time-honoured tradition of men who were either dying or enjoying the attention. But downstairs, the tinker shop was mostly hers. Hers, and the cobwebs’.

  “It broke again,” said Gami, staring at the lighter as if betrayal had just been made manifest in brass.

  Yenna sighed and placed her etching tool down. “You used up all the fluid already?”

  Gami gave a one-shouldered shrug. The shrug said: Yes, and also the world is a soggy mistake.

  “Bring it over. I’ll top it up.”

  Gami flipped the lighter shut and started across the room, weaving through a battalion of half-built gizmos, jars of suspiciously twitching screws, and copper limbs in need of purpose.

  She reached the workbench—and hesitated.

  “Can’t help if you don’t give it to me,” Yenna said, smirking. It was the kind of smirk that expected a quip in return.

  It didn’t get one.

  “Let me guess,” she continued with a sigh, smile slipping away, “the lighter’s not really the problem?”

  Gami chewed the inside of her cheek, reluctant to answer.

  Hidden Professions—real ones, with proper capital letters and hidden objectives—were the stuff of stories told in greasy taverns and badly written memoirs. Most Delvers retired without ever finding one. Many died seeking them. Yet now, Yenna had stumbled into one, or at least something profession-adjacent, and it suited her. High Intelligence. Steady hands. Patience. All things Gami didn’t have.

  That didn’t make it easier to say what she said next.

  “I’m starting to agree with the others, Yen,” she began, quietly. “We should leave.”

  There it was. Said plainly. No frills. No jokes. Just the truth, heavy as a dropped anvil and twice as unwelcome.

  Yenna’s expression went still. Not surprised—this wasn’t the first time the idea had surfaced—but this was the first time Gami had put weight behind it.

  “You saw what they did to that woman,” she went on. “This place… it’s cursed.”

  Not in the dramatic, fire-and-brimstone sense. No, this was the quieter kind of curse—the sort that crept. The sort that seeped into your bones before you realized it was there.

  Breaking that bauble had been a worse crime than either of them had realised. It had seemed trivial then—just a strange trinket, a fragile thing of carved glass and petty enchantment.

  But when they’d returned to the town square that afternoon—having only just tucked Edrik Kain into his bed at the Clatterwane—the sobbing woman was already swinging from the end of a rope, gently nudged by the breeze like a melancholy wind chime.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  She’d hung there ever since, swaying above the cobblestones in slow arcs that made the mist look like it was breathing. And not one single soul had spoken her name, let alone tried to cut her down.

  “I don’t disagree,” Yenna said quietly, sinking back into her chair.

  If Gami understood how rare this opportunity was for her, then Yenna understood it with diagrams, footnotes, and a very specific ache behind the eyes. Becoming a Tinkerer with a hidden specialization wasn’t just rare—it was practically mythical. But even myths lose their shine when they start hanging people from rafters.

  “Still,” she added, “the ship won’t be ready until the week’s out, right?”

  Because that was Ashenmoor for you. Even when you decided to leave, the town found a way to politely inform you that it wasn’t quite finished with you yet.

  Gami flicked the lighter again, more out of habit than hope. Nothing. Not even the courtesy of a spark. “Damn all of this,” she muttered, snapping it shut and holding it out to her friend with the universal gesture of you’re the smart one, fix it. “And you’ve still got nothing from talking with…?” She gestured vaguely toward the ceiling, where the coughing had taken on a sort of theatrical flair.

  “Nothing,” Yenna said, unscrewing the lighter’s top as if she’d already done it a thousand times—probably would, if her friend continued using it at this pace. “Just vague indications that those…baubles are important. But we kind of figured that out when they started hanging people over them, yeah?”

  She gave Gami a crooked smile, the kind that tried to say don’t worry but ended up admitting this really is cursed, isn’t it?

  A moment later, she solemnly added, “Sorry your first dungeon wasn’t the goblin-smashing extravaganza we both expected.”

  Gami snorted.

  “Tell me about it,” she said, diving at the opportunity to complain. “I didn’t dump my entire spec into strength and combat just to play amateur detective in Fogville where whatever murder we’re meant to solve hasn’t even taken place yet. Well, besides that woman, I guess?”

  She slumped into the nearest armchair with the grace of a collapsing siege tower. “Even so, Alek’s still complaining that humane haircare doesn’t go with humidity, Alana looks like she’s two sighs away from setting the place on fire, Cassius is still sick, and Jodi’s locked herself in her room doing gods-know-what. The only one who’ll even consider checking out the catacombs with me is you—and you’re stuck here playing with solder and soul gears.”

  She leaned forward, rubbing her temples. “If this keeps up, I’m gonna—”

  The chime above the Clatterwane’s door rang out.

  Both women looked over. It was Desmond.

  He stood in the doorway like a damp warning, soaked to the skin, breathing hard, and wearing the expression of someone who’d either seen something dreadful or had just been told he’d inherited a cursed estate in a place called Shriek Hollow.

  “And what happened to you?” Gami asked, eying the boy. “Did you go for a swim in the town’s collective misery, or what?”

  “No, I…” he panted, the words dragging themselves out between ragged breaths. “Have you seen Cassius?”

  “Cassius?” Yenna repeated, having only just uncapped the nearby bottle of lighter fluid. “Why would we have seen him? We’ve been here all day, and he’s still locked in his room, coughing like the town owes him money, no?”

  Desmond shook his head, still trying to get his lungs and his words to cooperate on the same project. “No, he—it was—” He paused, swallowed hard, and finally forced the sentence into the world. “His cough was only getting worse after you left this morning. A real nasty spell—sounded like he was throwing up a lung. Around lunch, Jodi finally came out of her room. Said she’d take him to see the town doctor. Just showed up, all casual, like nothing’s been weird for days.”

  Gami and Yenna exchange a look.

  Jodi, who had barely spoken a word with them since they arrived in this cursed town. Who hadn’t left her room in weeks. That Jodi?

  “I think she just got sick of the noise—we all did, but…” Desmond’s voice trailed off into the general fogginess of doubt.

  “But what?” Gami prompted, tone firm.

  The logic, on paper, made sense.

  Cassius was ill. Doctors existed. Sick people went to doctors. Even in Ashenmoor, presumably. But paper logic didn’t mean much when weeping women were found dangling by the neck in the town square.

  “She was strange,” Desmond said helplessly. “Jodi, I mean. Stranger than usual. Mari kept going on about it, wouldn’t let it go. Said something was wrong with the way she spoke. Said her eyes didn’t blink right. I don’t know. And now I can’t find either of them.”

  “And none of the others have seen them?” Yenna asked, the question rhetorical by tone alone.

  “No, I—”

  This time, it was no doorbell that interrupted them. It was the creak of the stairway, its voice slow and splintery.

  Half-way down into the shop, clinging to the banister like a man hanging on to the last shreds of patience with the living world, stood Edrik Kain.

  “If the time has come for your friend to see the Doctor,” Kain rasped, each word as brittle as dry leaves yet heavy as the weather, “then I wouldn’t waste my time worrying about him.”

  The words weren’t shouted. They didn’t need to be. Somehow, his frail voice filled every inch of the shop, pressing down on the ticking gears, the hissing vents, and the soft pit-pat of the rain beyond the windows.

  Gami rose from her seat.

  She was not the type to wilt under ominous pronouncements, cryptic stairtop prophets, or people who spoke in riddles in general.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, squaring her shoulders, voice sharp.

  Cassius might not have been the greatest of companions, occasionally arrogant, and probably faked a fever once to get out of latrine duty—but he was still theirs. He was part of the party. And that meant something.

  “The only doctor here is the Sea,” Edrik said, coughing into his sleeve like he was trying to get ahead of his own obituary. “And she rarely lets go of a patient once they’re in her care.”

  “Why would Jodi bring him to the sea?” Yenna asked. She stood now, too. “We’re a party. We came here together.”

  Edrik Kain gave the sort of nod usually reserved for grave diggers. “And so did a hundred other parties of Delvers before you, all brave and bright-eyed and full of destiny. Some of them even got to leave. But none left whole. And never together. Ashenmoor doesn’t let people go. Not until the Depths have had their fill. Only fools would listen to their call—would come here—but unfortunately, the world is full of fools.”

  At the corner of Yenna’s sight, a notification flickered into view.

  New Revelation!

  Something is wrong with your friends. Your mentor seems to believe they’re down by the docks, but he also advises you against going there.

  What will you do?

  “If you go,” Edrik continued, as if direct response to the System prompt that hovered before their eyes like a guilty conscience, “leaving this place won’t be so simple no more. The Sea sees all, and she rarely lets go once she’s taken an interest. Only fools stares into the Depths for too long.”

  The Warning Has Been Given.

  The Silting Begins.

  It was Desmond who broke the silence, and this time not with words but a sharp, startled gasp, like someone had stepped on the tail of his soul.

  “Look!”

  They turned. What greeted them was not the dreary street they’d come to expect.

  What had once been merely damp and grey was now bathed in a shade of red that had no business being there. Not the red of a good fire or a noble banner—no, this was arterial. This was the red of warnings written in blood and walls that remembered.

  The mist hadn’t just thickened. It had steeped, like a bad dream left too long in hot water. It clung to the buildings like old sins and seeped into the cracks of the cobblestones like regret.

  Ashenmoor was bleeding, and at the corner of Yenna’s periphery, a very real timer had begun to tick down.

  Survive the Silting.

  01:00:00…

  00:59:59…