System Report

  Back to the Present

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  Inside the Clatterwane, damp coughs echoed between scorched shelves and sagging walls.

  The quiet leaned in. Expectantly at first. Then patiently. But as no continuation came to the artificer’s tale—just the steady rattle of a man whose lungs were slowly failing him—the silence was broken as Mari softly asked:

  “What was the question?”

  Kain looked up, eyes wet and erratic. “How to hide from them,” he said, breathing as though the air itself had become negotiable. He took another moment, as if fishing for strength in an empty pond. “The next time I saw Her… something had changed. She’d done something. I could tell. Something irreversible.

  “She was wounded. Weak. Hurting. She needed a place where they couldn’t find Her, and we… We needed a functioning Core. It wasn’t the deal. But back then we thought—we foolishly thought—that we’d outsmarted Her. But over the years, I’ve started to wonder if everything that happened… happened because She let it. Had she wished to, She could have killed us all.”

  He paused, voice dropping to a whisper. “But She was waiting for something. And for Her to wait, She needed to hide. Her powers—that terrifying, beacon of power capable of warping entire worlds—were… inconvenient. They needed to be sealed somewhere they couldn’t find.”

  “What do you mean?” Mari breathed. “Waiting for what and… What did you do to her?”

  There are silences that say nothing, and silences that say everything.

  Alana let out a short, incredulous laugh. “You’re telling me this place is hiding some vengeful, godlike being?”

  Kain said nothing.

  “Wonderful,” Alana muttered, arms folded and nails digging into her skin. “What’s next? Eldritch horrors? Demons?”

  “The baubles…” Yenna said quietly, lost in her own thoughts. A shattered glass sphere. A woman hung in the town square—murdered, so that she wouldn’t turn into one of them. The hungering Depths, a broken scenario, and endless whispers in the mist.

  “The townsfolk,” she continued, “they tore out their own souls willingly, didn’t they? Turned themselves into NPCs just to escape its call. Because that was the only way. That ‘Core’ you mentioned, it doesn’t let go, does it? Once it has you, it doesn’t let go.

  “With every gift given, it binds you to it—strength given in exchange for its insidious, growing influence. And should it so see fit, it will guide you forward, toward its own goals hidden as yours, whispering new secrets into your ears. It—the ‘Core’…” She glanced at Kain. “…It was a first iteration of the System we know today, wasn’t it?”

  The elderly artificer gave a grim, wheezing chuckle.

  “So, I’ve heard it called,” he said, though the amusement drained from his voice as he continued, “But there was nothing willing about what we did. We didn’t want to lose our souls—to rip out everything it had given us. But we ran out of options. Things didn’t get better with Her trapped here. If anything, they got worse.”

  He leaned back, eyes far away. “The Depths—this place, this wound in the world—they’re what happens when something dark is left to rot for too long. A broken Core, forcefully mended by Her powers—festering, feeding on the greedy and the foolish alike. Her presence lingers like a curse upon us all. It seeps into everything. Everything…”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “In trying to repair the Core—” Yenna continued where he trailed off, the scattered pieces gradually fitting together within her mind "—a Core already infected by…Her—you didn’t recreate the seed of the System you once saw; you turned this place into a Dungeon. A Dungeon that has, ever since, been eating into you all.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?” Mari asked, her quiet voice hardly more than a breath.

  “Leave?” Kain echoed slowly, as though the idea had to travel a very long distance to reach him. “You don’t leave Ashenmoor. You just sink slower than the rest.”

  “Then what about Cassius?” Alana cut in, her voice sharp. “That bastard didn’t seem to have any trouble sauntering out of here to lure us in.”

  “No matter how far he wandered, his soul remained trapped here,” Yenna answered in her master’s stead. “You, Cassius, the townsfolk—you are as much a part of this world as it is of you. Without Her, there is no Ashenmoor. And without Ashenmoor… there is no ‘you.’ And to keep Ashenmoor alive, there must be Delver sacrifices.”

  Kain gave a macabre smile. “A wonderful little conundrum, isn’t it? But it seems that She’s no longer satisfied being trapped in here. Ashenmoor will soon be no more… and not all welcome it.”

  He shook his head, letting the words roll out slowly. “What remains of the Core doesn’t wish to be destroyed. The Depths fear their old mistress, and the townsfolk fear death. Even now, whatever of those fools didn’t come here in an attempt to stop me are bound to be scrambling, doing everything they can to delay the inevitable. But it’s too late. I’ve already undone the Rune-seals. Whatever she was waiting for has arrived.”

  Kain’s voice dropped, hushed, almost intimate. “Still, they’ll keep scrambling, clinging to every last minute of their lives like drowning rats clutching driftwood. And the priest, he’s a dangerous man. There’s no telling what he will do now that the seals are gone. Only that he needs to be stopped if you wish to make it out of here alive.”

  New Objective:

  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.

  Failure: Death.

  “W-we have to go out there again?” Mari’s voice was a whimper, her gaze flicking across a screen that must’ve materialized before her eyes as well, and then toward the windows. Beyond lay the mist, the shadows, and a town that seemed to be waiting.

  The fear in the girl’s eyes was as palpable as the weary exhaustion that marred her face. None of them looked much better. They all wore the haggard appearance of people who had barely slept, eaten worse, and spent most of the night scrambling for survival.

  A night that was gradually breaking into dawn, yet the nightmare was far from over.

  It was only getting started.

  01:00:00…

  00:59:59…

  00:59:58…

  ***

  Even through the haze of her fading consciousness, Gami could hear the cries. They were wet, gurgling things, like someone had taught a kettle to sob and then dropped it in a well. She might have laughed at the thought, had her constitution allowed it.

  Her every breath felt borrowed. Her every heartbeat, a small loan with predatory interest. And yet, even as her legs were barely able to carry her forward, she kept following that sound.

  That soft, wretched, bubbling cry.

  And then there was the door.

  A door that should have never been unlocked, slightly ajar.

  The crying grew louder. Not quite human in sound, but too much so in sorrow.

  Gami clutched her knife, slick with blood she hoped wasn’t hers, and nudged the door open.

  The chamber inside wasn’t large. Six paces across, maybe seven. The walls, floor, and ceiling were marked by strange, looping patterns. And lining those walls, tucked into recesses, were… glass spheres, ticking and clacking?

  In the center of the room, kneeling, was the creature. It wept. Perhaps over its fingers. They were ruined, shredded down to pale bone and hope. Blood—fresh, dry, congealed, festering—was smeared across the floor. Yet it still kept clawing weakly at the stone floor as if trying to dig itself out of its own tragedy. The air was thick with the smell of sea water and futility.

  It must have been at it for days. Maybe weeks, even.

  Yet the moment Gami noticed the pitiful creature, something shifted.

  It was the smallest of motions. A breath, a shift in weight, the sort of thing you’d normally do without thinking. But for the creature, it was as if someone had flipped a cosmic switch labelled “Enough.” Something inside it melted, quite literally, and it folded in on itself like a dropped coat.

  Gami stood there for a moment longer, blinking at the heap of no-longer-crying creature, and then, the ticking crept in. The baubles lining the walls, whirling, twisting, restlessly waiting like animate beings, seemed to turn their attention towards her.

  “Coming… She is coming… Needs to be stopped… Help us.”