System Report:

  A Shallow Patchwork

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  “This realm is crumbling. Has been, ever since Her return…”

  Edrik Kain sat upon what had once been a chair, though now it bore more of a resemblance to an arrangement of scorched wood that happened to remember being one. Most of Clatterwane’s furniture had been reduced to ashes.

  He spoke with the kind of finality reserved for old men, doomed kings, and people who have just realized the pub really has closed for the night.

  “But now, the cracks have grown too big for this place to contain what it has been for centuries.”

  His hand slunk under the folds of his coat and came out again with a vial—fractured, grimy, and altogether tired of existing.

  “This is Ashenmoor,” he said, holding it up toward the single lamp that still struggled against the damp and ashen morning. It flickered stubbornly, as if annoyed at being made a witness to any of this.

  The liquid inside swirled when he tilted the vial, breaking against the sides in tiny, futile waves. Each time it struck a crack, faint engravings sparked into life—like scribbled promises, like duct tape on the universe—bright for a heartbeat, then fading again, apologetically.

  “Patchwork upon patchwork of shoddy solutions,” Kain wheezily went on, as the glow dwindled, “has held it this long. But this time—”

  Another swirl, an engraving that failed to light up, and the vial broke with the soft crack of inevitability. The glass collapsed, spilling its contents across the blackened floor.

  “—it failed.”

  For a long while, only the hiss and spit of the acrid liquid against the floor, a world crackling and smouldering in the background, and the pitter-patter of rain kept the silence from falling.

  “The Silting?” Mari’s voice broke through at last. It was quiet, careful, as though afraid that the wrong words might bring the whole building down.

  Yenna, for her part, remained busy staring at her own hands as though they might reveal some truth if she just clenched and unclenched them often enough.

  Alana stared at her in turn, bandaged and battered, eyes glinting with the simmering, banked heat of someone who still very much wanted murder.

  Desmond no longer begged and was down to sobbing, curled in the corner with his ruined hand clutched to his chest, making the noises of someone that’d run out of words long before they ran out of pain.

  “An act of desperation.” Edrik Kain shook his head, chest rattling with a cough that didn’t quite make it out. “You don’t call upon the Depths and expect cooperation. It was doomed to fail from the beginning.”

  Mari frowned, her question more a reaching hand than a challenge. “Then… what part failed?”

  Yenna’s voice came before her master’s could, heavy with the weight of realization. “We didn’t die when we were supposed to.” She let her fingers fall still.

  “Ashenmoor was never meant to be the gentle passage from Tutorial into First Layer they promised us,” she continued, voice void of emotion. “It was a death sentence dressed in ceremony. All those layers of patchwork, the ones you spoke of—Delver sacrifices, isn’t it? The blood of the System’s chosen poured into the cracks. This place was never meant to be cleared. We were meant to die here, feeding whatever cursed seal holds this place together.”

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  The words hung like smoke.

  The dagger Alana had been flicking stilled. She spat the words, “And what the hell is that supposed to mean? You mean the System has just been fattening us up all this time? The Tutorial, the selection, the—”

  “Not the System,” Yenna said. “Not directly, at least. We chose the Dungeon. We chose the path. But we had help choosing badly. A push here, a whisper there. It wasn’t really chance that led us to Ashenmoor, was it?”

  Alana’s eyes narrowed.

  “Cassius…?”

  With a swift kick, the woman sent one of the last standing drawers clattering across the floor. “That old bastard tricked us! I knew he was full of shit when he said he just ‘happened’ to find a ship bound for some rare dungeon—‘easy yet with great rewards,’ wasn’t it? The sort of phrase you only hear from liars and salesmen. Bloody bastard!”

  “His disease,” Yenna pressed on, her voice cutting past Alana’s anger, “it is the same that plagues you, isn’t it?” Her gaze locked on Edrik, cold and steady. “The curse is eating away at you, and you needed us to die so you could keep living.”

  As she thought back on it, the signs had been everywhere.

  Cassius had been too old for a novice Delver, too polished in his lies, too convenient in his timing. Every word from him had been bait on a hook, leading them toward their death with shallow promises.

  He had been there, egging Alek on as she and Gami were tasked with checking out the docks. He had insisted that Yenna going alone would be enough, and he’d most likely pushed for the others to go check out the catacombs as well, hoping that they’d never return.

  They were never meant to see a second morning in Ashenmoor.

  But plans, like glass vials, sometimes broke when you least expected it.

  Something had gone wrong.

  “How sharp the mind seems,” Edrik Kain rasped, “when it isn’t clouded by unnecessary emotions, does it not?”

  He managed a grim smile before another cough tore through him, leaving gall and blood upon his chin where days of stubble had taken root.

  The truth was plain: the old artificer was dying.

  Not poetically, not gloriously. Just… dying.

  “But no,” Kain went on, each word dragged out as though from a well too deep, “it wasn’t just to live on. Though centuries of life have been… a convenient side-effect, that was never the purpose.”

  His eyes darkened, not with anger, but with the weight of something older, heavier, unspoken. “The truth of Ashenmoor runs deeper. Far deeper; darker. And it began… long, long ago…”

  The shop seemed to still, to hold its breath and darken, the whole world leaning in until nothing but Edrik Kain’s voice filled the space of their consciousness:

  “When I first came to this place, I was still a young man. The Underfold wasn’t the Underfold yet. She wasn’t even the Greater Dungeon. Names came later, supplied by people who survived long enough to write them down. Back then, there were only her Overlords: beings whispered of in the dark, in the kind of hushed voices that know full well whispering won’t save you.

  The System you know—the tidy farce of contracts, rules, and Dungeon Masters who smile for the stage—hadn’t even been imagined. Oh, there were dreamers, yes. But most called them ridiculous; their dream the sort that belonged in a tavern after too much wine.

  Unifying our chaotic worlds under anything other than raw power? Nothing but a shallow pipe dream. Still seems that way, if I’m honest… but that’s beside the point.

  This isn’t about the System—not in any iteration you would recognize it, at least. This isn’t even about the Underfold. This is the tale of Ashenmoor. And of the one who broke an entire realm for her revenge.

  I won’t claim to know who She was, or where She came from. What drove Her, what chased Her, what bent Her into what She became. I don’t. Few of the living do. And I have lived longer than most.

  But Her story is Ashenmoor’s story. And if I can retell it at all, it is only through the eyes of a young, reckless, and detrimentally ambitious artificer… Myself.

  And it all began beneath a storm that had been brewing longer than anyone cared to measure, many centuries ago—or perhaps longer still.

  Centuries like days have a way of losing count when no one’s around to mark them…

  Secrets of Ashenmoor:

  An Artificer’s Tale

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