System Report:

  Ashenmoor Seaside

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  Desmond’s voice crackled through the salt-stained air.

  "Yenna, I can't—" There was a pause as a wave introduced itself to the side of the boat. “I can’t keep the bandages on like this!”

  The sea, though technically calmer ever since the departure of the Things-With-Too-Many-Teeth, kept rocking the boat with vengeance. The crimson moon had slunk behind sulking clouds, and the harsh rain fell sideways more than down.

  The bandage, only loosely attached to Yenna’s side, did its best impression of a flag of surrender, fluttering bravely in the wind.

  “Then do it when we get back to shore!” Yenna barked back, each syllable carefully measured and paid for in pain. Her entire left side felt like it had gone to a different, considerably worse, dimension. The world wobbled in and out of focus, either from blood loss or mana depletion or both—her internal systems were probably flashing so many warnings she was surprised her ears weren’t beeping worse.

  Somewhere, buried beneath adrenaline and recklessness, a part of her knew she could pull up her System interface and check her status. It would likely say something helpful like “BLEEDING OUT” or “YOU ARE TECHNICALLY STILL ALIVE, BUT ONLY IN THE WAY A CANDLE IS AFTER BEING DROPPED INTO A BUCKET.”

  But she, like most Delvers, didn’t particularly enjoy seeing her own mortality rendered in numbers. Knowing how close you were to death rarely helped the situation, unless you were writing a will.

  “I—I don’t think…” Desmond faltered. His voice had that edge that meant he was about to say something he very much didn’t want to be right about.

  That maybe the others were gone. That maybe this whole thing was a pointless waste of time. That maybe, just maybe, trying to practice battlefield medicine on a bucking fishing boat during a minor storm was not in the recommended usage instructions for sterile gauze.

  Yenna—sole advocate for their reckless endeavour—hunched over the oars. Every muscle screamed in mutinous solidarity. Her body wanted to collapse in on itself, to roll into a soggy ball and quietly expire somewhere less dramatic.

  But they were still out here. They had to be. Yenna felt it in the same place she usually kept gut instincts, irrational hope, and leftover spells.

  “Then don’t think,” she hissed, “just keep looking. They're out here. I know it. Right, Mari?”

  It wasn’t the kind of statement that invited contradiction. It wasn’t even a question. It was the verbal equivalent of being grabbed by the collar and shaken until the truth fell out.

  The girl, huddled against the bow and desperately peering into the darkness, Third Eye darting through the rain, flinched at the demand.

  “I–I might have seen something, but—”

  “Where?” Yenna snapped, the word cutting like glass.

  Mari’s shaky hand wavered toward the darkness. “That way. But it might have just been driftwood and—”

  Yenna didn’t care to hear the rest.

  She hurled herself forward, over the oars, into motion. The little vessel bucked against the waves, nearly throwing a yelping Mari overboard.

  “Keep directing me,” Yenna yelled, each breath a sharp-edged thing that felt more like a jab than respiration.

  Desmond whimpered something again—probably about her wound, or how she was losing too much blood, or maybe just quietly panicking in the tone of someone trying not to repeat the same thing for a hundredth time while actively applying pressure to the thing trying to kill her.

  “Gami!” Yenna shouted into the rain, her voice cracking under the effort. “Gami, we are over here!”

  The sea didn’t answer, of course. All it offered was wind and water and the vast, terrifying silence of things that don’t care if you live.

  “Gami!”

  Her breath was shorter now, thinner. Her body was running on something deeper than willpower—something primal, forged from loss and the kind of stubbornness that could only ever be called desperation if one had run out of better explanations.

  “There! Over there!” Mari’s voice rose up out of the storm like a lighthouse beam—small, frantic, full of hope she wasn’t quite ready to believe in.

  Yenna twisted the boat around or tried to. She collapsed over the oars, vision greying at the edges, the world reduced to sound and motion and pain and—

  “I knew you were still alive,” she coughed, each word a struggle against her own lungs as Desmond and Mari frantically hauled the figure out of the water. “I knew you were…”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  It was not Gami.

  It was Alana.

  Shivering. Half-drowned. Clinging to what had once been a mast and was now more drift than wood. Still alive—barely—but unmistakably not the person she’d so desperately tried to save.

  Hope, it turned out, had a cruel sense of humour.

  ***

  The embers crackled like an old man’s complaints about the damp, and the sound drifted into Yenna’s fevered subconscious with soft insistence.

  Voices came next—low, bitter, muffled by smoke and the wetness of everything.

  “We can't stay here…”

  A flicker of her eyelashes revealed a world washed grey by rain. The jetty—what remained of it—smouldered faintly, charred bones of timber clinging stubbornly to the idea of still being a structure. A few brighter-burning bits had been herded together, forming the ghost of a campfire.

  “The other two…?”

  A pause. A head shaken.

  Three shadows hunched near the fire. Three miserable silhouettes, flickering like guilty memories in the firelight. Four if you included a barely conscious Yenna.

  Which meant the others were still out there. Or under there. The waves didn’t leave much room for in-between.

  “There was only one bell-toll!” Yenna wanted to shout. She tried to shout, but it came out as a murmur buried in a breath. “At least one more of them has to be alive, you selfish cowards…”

  Gami had to be alive. There was no scenario, no possible permutation of reality, where that wasn't true.

  But there was no strength left to argue. And, even if she had found the breath to scream it at them—spitting defiance and blood into the ash—they wouldn’t have listened. People rarely did when it mattered most.

  She’d already learned that the hard way.

  “What do we do now?” someone miserably asked. “I doubt we’re welcome in the town anymore.”

  A silence followed.

  And then:

  “The Clatterwane,” Yenna whispered. Her eyes had already drifted shut once more, voice sounding like it had been borrowed from someone else—someone hollowed out by smoke and seawater. “We’ll be safe at the Clatterwane…”

  It was the only sensible option left. Not that “sensible” was a strong currency anymore. But when the System was floating before your eyes like a smug librarian presenting the next chapter in your doomed adventure, you didn’t argue.

  Scenario Updated:

  You have survived the Silting, but Ashenmoor no longer welcomes you. Find a safe place to greet the morning.

  The Clatterwane. Edric Kain’s workshop. The home of her recently acquired mentor and the one man who’d seemed willing to talk.

  If there was one place with answers, it was his.

  Yenna’s thoughts swirled one last time—around the broken dock, around the flickering fire and the cold hands of exhaustion gripping her limbs, around the haunting memory of her friend disappearing beneath the waves as the world erupted—and then she slipped away again. Not into death, just into sleep. The kind of sleep that feels like drowning, only warmer.

  Gami had to be alive.

  Had to.

  ***

  She remembered going under.

  Not the gentle kind of "under" you did in a warm bath with bubbles and a scented candle. No—this was the other kind of under, the kind that came with a raging sea and slick and thrashing tentacles wrapped around your legs.

  And then the world had caught fire. Not poetically. Not metaphorically. Literally caught fire.

  The sky above the surface had split open with a bloom of red and orange, roaring like a wounded god raking its fury across the world. Even the water had burned—boiling, steaming, evaporating.

  Then came the shockwave.

  A detonation that punched through the sea like a fist made of thunder, shattering the waves into spirals of surging foam. The pressure hit her from every direction, crushing and relentless.

  After that, there had only been chaos.

  Bubbles tore past her face. Limbs—hers and others—flailed in all directions. Something huge thrashed nearby, shrieking with the sort of anguish that made your spine shiver.

  Her lungs screamed. Her ears screamed. Her eyes, had they not already been full of saltwater, would probably have joined in for solidarity.

  Up and down stopped applying. Only pressure, searing heat, and the deeply unfair sensation of drowning sideways.

  Furious shapes surrounded her. Shadows that didn’t care who she was. They didn’t care what she wanted. They only cared about one thing: pulling her under. Deeper. So, she did what anyone with no oxygen and too much adrenaline would do:

  She fought them.

  She fought everything, with everything. Arms, teeth, fists, elbows—she thrashed like she meant to end the sea itself. She bit whatever got too close. Clawed at anything further away. And frantically tried to kick her way toward a surface that’d disappeared.

  That was the last thing she remembered.

  And then—

  Gami coughed. Not a dainty cough, either, but the kind of full-bodied, lung-evacuating expulsion of water that left her throat raw and her body quivering.

  Salt burned her eyes, her tongue, and every regret she’d ever had.

  She was alive. Or, at least, not dead.

  Darkness surrounded her. Not the gentle dark of nighttime, but the thick, wet kind that clung to your skin and your soul. A tomb of stone, pressing in from every direction.

  Then the lights came on.

  Ghostly lanterns flickered to life above her head. Pale greenish things, hissing as they illuminated her hazy surroundings.

  Before her stretched a tunnel, damp with ancient mist, echoing with a faint drip-drip, and reaching into the dark.

  Behind her, the path lay submerged under seawater. The surface shimmered faintly, and just beneath it, a shape floated. A twisted sea demon—all fangs and ruin and milky white eyes that reflected the lantern light.

  In its neck, her knife was deeply embedded.

  The creature’s scales clung to the metal as she yanked at it, and it took several tugs—each one a little less dignified than the last—before the blade came loose with a shlunk that sounded far too wet.

  “Now then, what kind of shitty scenario is this?” she rasped, breath still hitching in her chest, eyes fixed on the tunnel that curved into the darkness ahead, hardly kept at bay by peevish light.

  It was a good question. It deserved an answer. And, as was often the case in situations like these, an answer arrived.

  It floated, politely yet menacingly, in the corner of her vision—where all the worst messages liked to hang out.

  She has noticed your presence.

  She calls you closer…

  Gami stood still, soaked, bleeding, lungs like wrung-out rags, staring down the corridor carved from nightmare. There was no wind down here, no sound beyond the occasional drip of water and the faint, impatient hum of something waiting.

  Reaching into the pouch on her hip, she dug out some soggy herbs and shoved them under her lip. Easing the pain. Clearing her thoughts.

  Wiping her knife on her sleeve, she took a step forward.

  Because whoever She was, Gami didn’t plan on being called. She planned on answering—loudly, with steel.

  She planned on getting back to her friends.