Marie gasped as the icy cold water engulfed her head and sluiced down over her body in the morning gloom, but she didn’t waste any time.

  She worked up the soap into a lather and scrubbed vigorously at the parts of her body that weren’t currently healing from wounds. Then she rubbed more gently at the parts that were.

  Using a drop of water from her canteen she rinsed her hands and walked back over to the cistern, dipping the ewer back in and drawing out another measure for her hair.

  Back at her designated wash spot, she poured with one hand and ran her fingers through the tangled locks with another, trying to get out the worst of the dirt and knots.

  It was a semi successful process at best, though the addition of some of the soap lather half way through helped with the cleanliness at least.

  Then, because she could, she washed her hands clear of suds again and went back for a third time to rinse herself off entirely.

  It was refreshing. A spark that told her she was alive in this city of the dead.

  She wasn’t worried about wasting any either; with the amount that the cistern held, she could shower like this and drink her fill every day and not empty it for months, though she didn’t plan to.

  It was the second day after she’d retrieved her supplies, by her count. Her supplies and all the belongings she had. Water wasn’t the issue any more.

  She flicked some drops at the skeletal hound as it sat on its haunches a few yards off, watching her, but it didn’t move.

  She’d woken up yesterday morning to find it lying by her feet. It had waited patiently for her to get over the shock and to purify and drink some of the cistern water with her iodine tablets, then fill up her canteens and purify them too. It had even waited for her to eat one of the energy bars she’d pulled out - a small one she’d nevertheless found filling her up - with only a few pettings to keep it going, but it had clearly been waiting for her to play with it, and playing ‘fetch’ with the stone had taken a good hour of her morning.

  Once she’d dried and dressed herself, she did the same again today, though this time she cut the session short.

  Yesterday had been a day to rest and to heal. She’d done basically nothing beyond playing with the strange skeletal creature, nibbling rations, drinking water and getting plenty of sleep.

  Today she felt like a new woman. Her own family wouldn’t recognise her.

  A pang in her stomach brought her up short.

  She’d studiously avoided thinking about home…

  Then she forced it from her mind and got on with what she needed to do.

  Even having to find a place to do her business and using some of the precious loo roll (which, yes, would eventually run out) didn’t get her down; it was a sign she was getting healthier - she actually had something to pass through her system!

  She’d kept mostly to the ruin of the walled garden. It was fairly quiet in this neighbourhood, and only once so far had she ventured out to strike down a skeleton who’d got too close for comfort.

  There were pockets like this all over the surrounding couple of miles, she’d realised as she reviewed the area through her Skills. There wasn’t anywhere totally devoid of the undead, except the eerie crater to the north-east, but they were definitely more clustered in the open areas, and every now and then you came across a street or corner like this where almost none of them passed by. Whether that would change with time, Marie didn’t know, but for now she felt… if not safe, then secluded.

  So, she’d given herself yesterday off.

  But she had a limited amount of iodine tablets, and the snacks wouldn't last more than a few days. Even with her new [Stretch Supplies] Skill she’d have to ration them to make it to the end of a week here, and by then she needed to have found a new source of food.

  So if this were the fourth day, she wanted it to be the last in this city. There were so many questions here, and maybe some answers, but by tomorrow morning she’d be off.

  Which gave her the rest of the day to check out the mansion.

  —

  Marie stood in front of rusted, wrought-iron gates, battered and twisted but still effectively blocking the entrance to the ancient manor. She didn’t want to try and squeeze through if she could help it; the risk of injury from the jagged metal shards seemed too great. At best, she’d pick up some more scrapes and scratches and ruin another set of clothes; at worst, she’d get a spike through the arm or knock the gates down and bring every skeleton in half a mile running at the noise.

  But she had to get in somehow…

  The only thing she’d really done of any note yesterday had been to look at the pottery she’d taken from the old garrison. She’d tried piecing it together all afternoon, matching up the parts that looked like they could fit together, and only when she’d come up with her best bet had she turned to her Skill.

  “[Basic Reconstruction (Pottery)]. [Reconstruct Pottery]. [Basic Reconstruction]? [Pottery Reconstruct]?”

  She frowned in confusion.

  “Am I meant to say it in Latin, or wave a wand?”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  The other Skills worked. What about you, dog? Do you have any ideas?

  It had only been when she’d gone to put the shards away and put two next to each other that she felt the strange pressure on them, and realised with a smile of relief that the Skill didn’t reconstruct the thing for you, it allowed you to reconstruct the pottery yourself. It was like having an invisible glue that knitted the parts together when you got them in the right place.

  Of course, it didn’t work when she tried to position a few of the pieces she’d erroneously assumed would fit into the wrong places, but Marie liked to think she’d have figured that out with time and mundane means to hold the thing together if she’d had them. Perhaps a more advanced version would remake the thing entirely, but she liked what she had.

  It had kindled the fire that always burned inside her - the desire to know what had happened in the past. What had come before.

  It had convinced her to come here today.

  She’d already done a lap of the mansion. It cast a long shadow over the surrounding streets. The walls had weathered the devastation of this place better than most of the other buildings, though they were covered in scorch marks and had once been much taller if the amount of debris at the base was any indication. There were a couple of cracks, and she could probably scale them, especially with her [Sure Footing] Skill, but she’d be highly visible.

  There was another Skill she could try, but something was telling her that [Mighty Leap] wouldn’t make her able to clear a tall wall in a single bound. And it still wouldn’t solve the visibility issue.

  The south side was no better. There were fewer structures on that approach, and even if there were also fewer of the undead, the mansion sat on …was it called a bluff? A buff?

  Whatever it was, unless she was willing to climb and be spotted, the gate was definitely the most obvious entrance point.

  “What do you think?”

  She looked down at the skeletal dog. It had followed her today when she’d left. She’d been worried it would object to her destroying the other skeletons she came across - the ones she couldn’t easily avoid - but the few times it had happened the dog hadn’t seemed bothered in the slightest.

  Indeed, it was still carrying the radius of the first one she’d struck down in its mouth like a chew toy.

  The dog didn’t seem to have any insights though, and she sighed and made a decision.

  She took off the rucksack and tucked it into the side of the gatepost where it jutted out a couple of feet. Taking her roll of tools, she stretched her arm carefully through the warped bars and put it on the other side. Then made some quick judgement calls and did the same with a canteen and the length of rope. Everything else she might need in a pinch was already in the pockets of her cargo shorts, and, divested of the bulky pack, she began to ease herself through the largest gap in the gates she could find.

  A couple of the bars snagged at her clothes and skin, but she made it through in less than a minute without a major incident. Without [Tough Skin] it might have been a different story, but she didn’t feel any cuts.

  Her skeletal companion watched her, then simply dropped the bone from its mouth and stepped through the bars itself, looking up at her as if to ask what the issue had been. She narrowed her eyes at it in mock rebuke, then started up the short rise to the manor grounds proper.

  It was a scene of utter devastation, and it caught her off-guard.

  From the outside it looked like the place had escaped the worst of it, but within the walls it was worse than anything else she’d seen in the city. Not counting the eerie crater. Or the shape that had been moving in t-

  The ground had been torn up. Great gouges had rent it asunder. Miniature craters dotted the space as though it had been the target of clusters of bombs. It looked worse than pictures of no-man's land in the First World War - lacking any sign that things had once lived here.

  It took her aback so much that she decided to try the main skill she’d been planning to use to learn about the house.

  “[Glimpse of the Forgotten]”

  She whispered the word with an almost reverent air. She’d tried it out the night before on her reconstructed pot, and for a few minutes, a ghostly figure of what the pot must have originally looked like had manifested floated in its space, and she’d studied the shape of a story told in stylised painted figures that had appeared round the sides.

  Now she inhaled as a tapestry of spectral colours overlaid the grounds in front of her, and gardens of surpassing beauty appeared before her eyes. Trees bearing strange fruits. Beds of flowers of a hundred hues and colours. Paths of a marble-like stone. A pond, replete with fish and lilies. Statues of-

  The image barely lasted ten seconds, if that, but it was enough for Marie to get a sense of how ornate the place must have been, which made it all the more jarring when the image faded.

  She sighed and made a note of the result. It had only lasted half that time when she’d tried to view the mansion on her approach.

  Larger objects have more to… restore perhaps? More detail? So the… magic of it… has less time?

  It was as good a reason as any, but fortunately she’d be able to try again in about a quarter of an hour.

  Turning her attention to the ruin of the mansion - which had once been three storeys tall - she took a picture with her phone and began walking towards the huge, empty archway that sat in the middle of the ground floor.

  Based on how intact it was, this was likely to be the best preserved site she’d come across, and she was going to make the most of the few hours she’d allotted to investigate it.

  The top two storeys were completely gone, and though it looked like there was some of the first floor structure left from the outside, she wasn’t going to risk its integrity without good reason, so as she passed through the entryway she glanced round to see what she had to work with. The cavernous entrance hall would have been grand once, though she’d need to wait a while longer to get a glimpse of just how grand.

  Half-shattered columns supported what would have been a mezzanine, though most of it had collapsed, as had a grand double-staircase opposite leading up to the first floor, and a huge chunk of the ceiling overhead which let some of the pale gloom that blanketed the rest of the city filter through to illuminate this place.

  Rubble was scattered over the floor, which was almost as ripped up as the grounds outside, but for some reason there seemed to be less debris than there should have been. For the amount of building that must have been above it, Marie would have expected to have to clamber over foot-deep clumps of rock and stone, but as it was there were a few sprawling piles and nothing more. She could even see a few tiles poking through the devastation, and… was that… Yes. Shards of glass!

  That was something new. An aspect of this culture she could add to her notes. She bent down.

  Ability to create glassware - perhaps windows? Possible size unknown. Definite curvature to numerous pieces, despite the small size. No hint of colour at this point.

  She’d have to return to see what it had come from with her [Glimpse of the Forgotten] later, but whilst she waited she wanted to get an idea of the layout of the place.

  Yawning archways led off deeper into the house to her immediate right and left, and further back on the left, along with one that ran through the centre of the grand double-staircase and led deeper into the house. The one just to her left had vomited rubble into the entryway at some point in the past, and looked unpassable beyond the first few feet. One half of the grand staircase might have been traversable, but the floor up there looked on the verge of collapse already. She didn’t trust it. None of the other three ways stood out from the other, so she picked the far left and began to walk, pulling her work gloves on, then turned around as the lack of sound made her realise something.

  “What’s the matter?”

  The strange canine skeleton had been following her all day, but as she moved further into the structure, it stopped at the entryway. It hadn’t set foot, or, rather, paw, in the building.

  Its silent refusal to go further sent a shiver down her spine, but she’d made up her mind, and she shrugged and pressed on, pulling her headlamp out and fitting the strap in place, but leaving it off for now…

  …just in case.

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