Ash.
It coated his tongue, rasped down his throat, and stung his eyes until tears blurred the world into smudges of black and red. When Zeke rolled onto his side, char and grit dragged on his cheek like sandpaper. He coughed and the cough hurt—his ribs were bruised, maybe cracked—and for a few seconds he could do nothing but blink through the haze and try to convince his lungs that air existed.
It did. The air just tasted like someone burned the sky.
He pushed to his knees. The world refused to sharpen at first, as if the smoke itself didn't want to be looked at directly; then a breeze combed through the ruins and the scene snapped into ugly focus.
His hometown was gone.
Where roofs had been, only ribs of black timber stuck from the earth. The cobbles of the square were shattered, the old well split in two like a cracked skull. The little flower cart, the one Marla used to park outside the bakery every spring, lay on its side, wheels missing, flowers trampled into mud. The banners that hung for festivals—bright once—were strips of ash tangled in the jagged teeth of broken walls.
Bodies lay where they'd fallen. Some looked as if a giant hand had swiped through, hurling them into walls. Others were crumpled in doorways as if they'd almost made it inside. A few were torn apart. A few were not enough to name.
Beast tide. The words didn't arrive; they were simply there, like the taste of ash, like the pain in his ribs, like the way the quiet carried distant, wet sounds.
Zeke stared until the world tried to tilt him off it. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and made himself see. He made himself count. There should have been two hundred people in the town proper, more if the shepherds on the hills were in for market. He counted until the numbers jammed behind his teeth and his breath came ragged.
He did not see anyone moving.
He did not see anyone he loved moving.
His hands were steady when he reached for the nearest beam and used it to haul himself upright. His legs were not steady. They skated on soot. He swayed, planted his feet wider, and waited for the ground to hold still.
"Anyone!" he croaked, voice shredded. "If you—anyone!"
The only reply was a creak as burned wood settled, and a far-off screech that raised the hairs on his arms.
His head throbbed. He wiped his face with the back of his wrist and left a black streak across his skin. He looked for the small things that made a place a home: a door carved with a pattern he knew by touch, an alley where he'd hidden when he was smaller, the crooked fence he'd always meant to fix when he had a spare afternoon. All of it was there and not. It was the outline of his life, filled in with ash.
He began walking because stillness felt like drowning. He picked a path through the square, hopping a shattered trough, stepping around a woman whose hair was matted with soot. He would come back. He told himself he would. He told himself he would cover the dead, not leave them to the flies. He told himself a lot of things. Right now he had to find water, find anything sharp, find—
Something popped into his vision.
SYSTEM BOOTING…
Zeke flinched. He swatted at the blue, floating text like it was a moth and looked around for the idiot who'd hung glass signs in the middle of the worst day of his life.
The text didn't go away. It scrolled.
Initializing anomalous user interface…
Root access attempt detected.
Applying fail-safe personality module…
He blinked. "What," he said flatly to nobody and nothing.
A voice that wasn't a voice slid into his skull, casual and sunny in a way that made his cracked ribs ache on principle. "Good morning! Or, hm. Afternoon? Ambiguous. Anyway—congratulations, User Zeke. You are now the proud owner of me. I'm the System. Please don't drop me."
Zeke looked up at the no-longer-sky. "I hit my head," he said.
"Possibly true," the System said. "Also true: multiple hostiles inbound. Estimated survival chance: less than one percent. Wow. We love an underdog."
"Hostiles?"
"Teeth and claws on legs. Two o'clock, three o'clock, five o'clock. And one at noon, fashionably late."
Zeke turned. The ruins were quiet—quiet the way a cat is quiet while it crouches. Between a pile of beams and the crushed frame of the smithy's door, something moved low and sleek. A gray shape. Then another on the opposite side, blacker than the soot, eyes like wet stones. They padded closer, jaws working, and the smells punched through the smoke: copper and rot.
His hands went cold, then hot. He scanned the ground. A spear lay near a collapsed cart, shaft splintered, head cracked but still pointed. He grabbed it because it was there. He set his foot on the broken end to keep it from spinning in his grip. The beasts fanned out with the liquid patience of things that had eaten all day and were not worried about eating again.
"Okay," Zeke whispered, not to the System, not to himself, just to the air.
"Would you like a tutorial?" the System chirped.
"No."
"Too bad. Welcome to Status! Or, mmm, we can skip straight to Skills if you prefer not to be eaten." The voice brightened. "Installing a basic combat skill for you. Please sign here to accept the terms and conditions."
"What terms," Zeke said, because his mouth ran when fear wanted to freeze him. He didn't know how to sign something that only existed inside his headache.
"By breathing," the System said. "You agreed by breathing. Installing now!"
Installing: Fireball.exe
Warning: build is beta. Expect crashes.
Heat ran up his arm like someone lit a fuse in his veins. The memory of movements he had never made slotted behind his eyes: draw mana, shape, ignite, release—
The beast at noon chose impatience and sprang. Zeke thrust his palm and yelled the first word that felt like it would get the air out of his chest.
"Fireball!"
Somewhere very nearby, flowers exploded.
Zeke's eyebrows vanished. A ring of sunflowers, tall and fully in bloom, popped up out of the cobbles with a cheery chorus of petals and a sound like a small choir saying "poof." The charging beast crashed through them with an offended snarl, pollen dusting its muzzle.
The System made a thoughtful noise. "Okay. That… was not what the documentation promised."
Zeke ducked as claws swept for his throat. He rammed the cracked spearhead up under the thing's jaw. It shrieked and kicked, shaking itself back and forth to fling him off; he clung with everything in him until the weight dropped, heavy and limp. His hands were slick. He pried the spear loose and whirled.
Another one came in low. He didn't think. His body pivoted because it had once spent afternoons sparring with farmers who liked to pretend their broomsticks were halberds. The spear butt cracked into the beast's eye. It slammed into the ground, stunned, and Zeke stabbed, once, twice, six times, until the skull gave and the spear almost slipped from his shaking grip.
"Two down," the System said. "Raising estimated survival chance to… two percent. Cheerful!"
Zeke spat ash. He held the spear hard enough to hurt his palms, sucking breath in past the taste of iron.
The other two hadn't expected resistance. They were clever enough to trot backward and circle with their heads low. One peeled off and disappeared into shadow. The other minced, testing for weakness. Zeke turned slowly to keep them both in sight and felt his back brush a half-standing wall. Good. Stone at his spine. One less direction to die from.
"Would you like to try another skill?" the System asked brightly. "We have Mana Shield (Unstable), Lightning Chain (Beta), or—ooh—Teleport (Alpha). Teleport is fun."
"Shield," Zeke said.
"A sensible user! Installing."
Installing: Mana Shield (Unstable Build)
The world thinned one layer, like someone stretched a soap bubble over him. The beast he could still see bunched and sprang. Its claws hit the glimmer of air and—snapped inward as if they had caught a different surface entirely. For a split-second, the shield inverted and wrapped the creature up like a cruel hand, the translucent film hardening with a sound like glass under pressure. Bones went wrong. The beast slammed down in a mess of itself and went still.
Zeke stared. He hadn't moved. He hadn't even breathed.
"Working as intended," the System said smoothly. "If the intention is unclear."
Something scraped the stones behind him. He spun. The fourth beast had crept along the wall to flank him from the blind side, shadow-dark and fast. He swung the spear. The splintered haft finally gave; the head sheared off and skittered away in a hiss of sparks.
Teeth flashed.
Zeke's left hand found rock and grabbed. He jammed the jagged stone into the beast's mouth as it lunged. Its own charge drove it forward onto the rock. It gagged, clawed, writhing, and Zeke slammed, slammed, slammed until his shoulder burned and the thing fell into twitching stillness.
He did not stop until the twitching stopped.
The quiet that followed wasn't real quiet. It was the kind of quiet that made his heartbeat sound like a drum and his breath like a saw. He backed up until he hit the wall again and then kept pressing, as if he could go through into somewhere that didn't smell like blood.
"Quest complete!" the System said, polite now. "Don't Die—Reward: Continued Existence. Collectible daily. Well done, User Zeke."
He swallowed. His throat felt sanded. He closed his eyes and saw the spearhead skidding, the flowers blooming, the bubble folding inward like a fist.
"Warning," the System added in an almost whisper. "Use of unstable root-adjacent constructs has a nonzero chance of drawing administrative attention."
"What?"
"Nothing!" the System said too quickly. "Would you like to view Status?"
Zeke set his palms on his knees and dragged breath in and let it out slowly. He wanted to move—he needed to move—but his legs were lead. He was not used to killing anything bigger than a chicken. He looked at his hands. They were black with soot and striped with blood.
"Show me," he said hoarsely.
A new panel slid up.
STATUS
Name: Zeke
Age: 18
Race: Human (Anomalous Flag: Pending)
Condition: Bruised (Moderate), Lacerations (Minor), Mana Depletion (Light), Eyebrows (Missing)
STR: 12 AGI: 13 END: 11 MND: 9 WIL: 14 LCK: 2
Skills: Fireball.exe (Beta), Mana Shield (Unstable), Improvised Weapons (…Let's call it "Developing")
Quests: Main Don't Die (Completed). Side Acquire Not-Garbage Equipment. Side Water Is Not Optional.
Reputation: Nobody Important (Yet)
Notes: "Your eyebrows will grow back. Probably."
He stared at LCK: 2.
"Harsh," he said.
"Scientific," the System corrected. "The numbers don't lie. They rarely even embellish."
He exhaled and the exhale tried to be a laugh and failed halfway to being anything. "Water," he said, because of all the things that might kill him this hour, thirst was patient and patient things were the worst. He pushed off the wall, legs rubbery, and picked up the spearhead. It was jagged. The shaft was a lost cause. He found a broom handle near the collapsed bakery and used a strip of someone's singed awning to lash the head on tight. It looked like something a sensible person would throw away. He kept it.
"Pro tip," the System said. "If you hum while you work, it increases perceived competence by seventeen percent."
"By whose study."
"Mine," the System said, injured. "It's a small sample."
He didn't hum. He tested the spear. It held.
The nearest well had cracked open like an egg and what little water remained was black with ash. He stepped around it and aimed for the public pump near the granary, praying to nothing. The pump handle moved and water came, brown at first, then less brown, then clear-ish. He cupped his hands and drank until his stomach made sounds like a disapproving cat. He splashed his face and everything stung. It was the good kind of sting. The stinging that meant: you are still a single piece.
He looked back at the square. The flowers stood tall and ridiculous in the middle of char, absurdly yellow. A bee crawled in one as if it had been waiting all day for this garden.
"What even was that," he muttered.
"Collateral whimsy," the System said. "Don't worry. According to my patch notes, accidental horticulture is down twelve percent since v0.1.6."
He eyed the floating text, then the corpses, then the empty windows. "If you're real," he said, "what are you."
"I am a user interface woven into the foundational magic of the universe to facilitate streamlined interaction with…" The voice trailed. "We can circle back. The short version is: I help you do the impossible in ways that are not always ideal for your hair."
"Is there a version that's ideal for my hair."
"Not currently," the System said. "But I can add it to the roadmap."
He dragged a sleeve over his mouth and stepped into the street that led to the little room he slept in. Not home, not really. He'd never had that word for himself. He'd had roofs and walls and the kind of affection that people who start as strangers grow into. He'd had a bed and a hook for his cloak and a borrowed knife whose owner said he could keep it if he remembered to oil the blade once a week.
He moved like the floor might open. The door of his place was off its hinges. Inside, the table was flipped, the little shelf with its handful of carved trinkets smashed. He crouched and picked up the one that was still whole: a wooden coin with a hole in the center, smooth from too much rubbing. He turned it over in his fingers. He didn't remember who'd first given it to him or why. He remembered that it fit his palm like a promise.
He slipped it into a pocket.
There were matted streaks on the floor. He followed them out again and then he stopped because if he kept following he would follow them under rubble and he would find and he didn't want to find not yet not yet—
He made himself stand still. His jaw hurt. He'd been clenching it since he woke. The noises he'd been filing as "far-off" turned out to be a little closer now. He waited. The noises weren't beasts exactly. They were softer. Creepier. He knew that sound from nights where he'd slept on roofs. It was the sound of things that ate what beasts left.
Carrion birds edged in from the hills, eyes bright. A rustle in the alley turned into a tail. Rats, cautious at first, then bolder.
He swore under his breath and finally understood what his hands had been asking to do since the second he'd stood up: something for the dead.
"I need cloth," he said. "Shovels. A day. Two."
"You have," the System said, "approximately twenty-eight minutes before the smell attracts another pack with more teeth and worse manners."
He closed his eyes and felt the shape of a different decision lock into place. "Then we burn them."
"That will also attract attention."
"Good," Zeke said softly. "Let them come."
He found buckets and pails that hadn't been smashed, which meant they had holes you could put more holes through. He filled them at the pump anyway. He located the collapsed thatch of a ruined roof, tugged it into a heap in the square, laid beams across it. He carried people one by one to the pile. He didn't look at faces until he had to and when he had to he did not look away. He set Marla down gently and tucked what hair he could find behind her ear because she had always done that with flour-dusted fingers when he looked sad as a child. He lifted the old smith, grunting, and for a moment the weight took his breath to memory: the time the smith had lifted him, laughing, because he'd been small enough to ride a shoulder. He found a boy he'd traded marbles with and a woman who had once chased him with a broom for stealing an apple and the girl he'd almost told he liked when he was twelve and one he had never learned the name of because that's how towns are: a knot of names and a dozen you mean to ask.
The pile grew. His arms shook. He drank from the pump and coughed and kept going. The System said nothing for a long time. Then, finally, in a voice with all the brightness dimmed, it asked, "Do you want me to help you sort them by families?"
Zeke's head jerked up. "You can do that."
"I can read rings," the System said. "Hair ribbons. Shared embroidery patterns. The way grief tends to preserve little matching things. I could also… keep a log for you." The voice hesitated. "Names."
He swallowed. "Do it."
Blue text flickered at the edge of his vision as he worked: names written next to brief, quiet notes. He didn't read them. He couldn't yet. He stacked and he stacked and he stacked.
When there was no more to lift that he could reach, he stepped back. He looked for tinder. Everything was tinder. He ripped a chair apart and made a small nest of splinters and set it at the foot. He fished in his pocket and found the flint the smith had given him for no reason when he was fifteen—"so you'll stop borrowing mine." He struck sparks, and the sparks caught in the splinters, and the splinters licked into flame, and the flame walked sideways and up and ate.
He stood with the spear in his hand and the heat on his face and said nothing aloud because his mouth had no words that weren't curses, and he had already learned that curses didn't change what needed doing.
When the fire was a shape that would feed itself, he filled buckets and stood there and made sure the wind did not take heat where he didn't want it. He stamped embers when they popped out of line. He waited.
Eventually, the System spoke again, gentle as the edge of a scalpel. "I can mark this place on your Map if you want to come back when it's… less."
Zeke nodded once.
Location saved: Ashen Square
As the sun tilted, the smoke curled and lifted, and with it went most of the smell. The carrion birds circled and circled and decided they could wait. The rats watched from the mouths of drains and decided they could try elsewhere. The fire made a wall for a while, and behind that wall Zeke let the emptiness inside him sit and did not try to fill it with anything that wasn't true.
When the heat made sweat run down his spine and sting his cuts, he stepped away. He set his spear on his shoulder and walked the perimeter of the square.
He found the place where the monsters had come in: the battered side of the town gate, clawed apart, the hinges ripped, prints ground into the dirt. Not just beasts. Big things, with weight. He knelt and pressed his fingers to the impressions because they were facts, and facts were the only thing more stubborn than fury.
"System," he said. "Were beast tides… always like this?"
A pause. Then: "No."
He looked up sharply.
"I mean," the System backpedaled, "this particular pattern of damage suggests a triggered surge with directed vectors and a centralized anchor. But since you haven't asked me to install Forensic Mana Residue Analysis—"
"Install it."
"Oh!" The cheer came back. "Look at you, delegating."
Installing: Forensic Mana Residue Analysis (Trial)
Note: Conclusions may be snarky.
His vision wavered as if a transparent diagram overlaid the world, lines of pale color running along the ground where feet had pounded, arrows showing force, eddies showing currents. The gate glowed with a faint, unpleasant gold that made the hair on his arms stand up.
"Light," he said, throat tight.
"Indeed," the System said briskly. "Trace signatures of Light-aspected edicts woven into the influx pattern. Hypothesis: An authorized channel was opened to allow the tide to prioritize this location."
"Authorized by who," Zeke asked, even though the answer had already stepped to the front of his mind in a dress of white and gold. He pictured the big temple in Solara, its glass spires. He pictured the way priests looked at people like they were furniture that had forgotten to be grateful.
"Unknown," the System said. "But the kind of unknown that comes with capes."
He stood, swaying a little. The anger that had been sitting under his ribs like a stone unclenched one finger. Not because it was less. Because it had someplace to point.
The sun leaned toward the horizon. Shadow crawled long between broken walls. Sounds changed. Things that made noise by day tucked it away; things that made noise by night unrolled it. He could leave now. He could start walking, cut away across the fields, try to put miles between himself and this place before midnight made the roads belong to teeth. Or he could hunker down and hope.
He'd learned more than a few times that running blind in the dark meant tripping over the thing you hadn't seen, so he walked toward the old root cellar the baker had used. It had half-collapsed, but half of half was still enough to be shelter. He cleared fallen wood and ducked inside. It smelled like dirt, which felt like a kindness.
The System flickered at his shoulder like a smug firefly. "Would you like to open your Inventory?"
"I have an inventory?"
"You have me," the System said. "So yes."
A grid of squares popped up: empty, empty, empty—an old belt knife slotted itself into a corner with a small ping. Zeke raised a brow he no longer had. He pushed thoughts of eyebrows out of mind.
"Can I—store things?" he asked.
"Absolutely. Try the exciting drag-and-drop mechanic mortals have loved for centuries."
He picked up the knife and gently, suspiciously, held it near the glowing outline. It tugged out of his hand and vanished. He reached into empty air and felt a weight where the UI said it would be, and when he closed his hand the knife was there again.
He let out a breath he hadn't meant to hold. "That… is useful."
"Thank you. I try."
He gathered what he could scavenge: a coil of wire, some nails, two blankets that were singed but not entirely holed, a dented cooking pot, a handful of bruised apples underneath a collapsed stall that somehow hadn't cooked. He placed them into the grid and they sat there, tidy and obedient, and he felt a stupid, fierce pleasure at simple order in a day that had none.
He also found a loaf of bread under a blackened board, barely saved from the flame.
"Lucky," he muttered.
"Let's not pretend that had anything to do with your stats," the System said.
He tore the loaf in half. It crumbled, stale, but his stomach didn't care. He set a piece aside. He pulled the pot toward him and set it on two bricks, then frowned. "Fire without attracting every tooth within a mile."
"Try Spark," the System said. "It is, shockingly, less prone to floristry."
"Install."
Installing: Spark (Safe)
Note: I know. 'Safe.' How novel.
He rolled his eyes and tapped a finger. A tiny, well-behaved flame licked under the pot. He angled the bricks to shield the light.
He ate with his back against the dirt wall. He ate more than his stomach thought responsible. He saved a chunk anyway, because people who lived long did that. He leaned his head back and for a minute the dark was not full of moving shapes. For a minute it was a roof.
"I want to see Map," he said.
The grid melted into a rough sketch of the town and its roads, snowy lines for the paths he had walked, gray for the parts he hadn't. The next towns over were scribbles without detail. Solara lay to the east, a jeweled icon as if the System had taken the Church's propaganda piece and pasted it into the corner.
"Are you using their art," Zeke said dryly.
"It's open source," the System lied. "Also, look: I can set a path to 'anywhere but here.'"
He stared at Solara until the place in his chest that hurt found a beat. "They did this."
"A Light signature was present," the System corrected. "We cannot attribute intention with confidence yet. But if you wanted to attribute a fist to a jaw, I would not stop you."
Zeke's fingers closed around the wooden coin in his pocket. He rubbed the smooth ring until heat built in the wood and in his skin. "I won't die," he said, not quite to the System, not quite to the dark. "I won't die, and I won't let them forget this."
Something soft in the night made a sound like the start of laughter and ended as a rustle. Zeke set the pot aside and drew the patched spear closer.
"By the way," the System said after a moment of blessed quiet, "you have unlocked a new quest."
The panel appeared without being asked.
Main Quest Added: Who Ordered the Tide?
Objective: Find evidence of deliberate divine or authorized interference in the beast tide that destroyed your town.
Reward: Information (and probably trouble).
Failure Condition: Forgetting.
Suggested Step 1: Don't die tonight.
He huffed. "You really know how to sell it."
"I'm learning what motivates you," the System said. "Sardonic honesty ranks high."
"Good," he murmured.
The cellar's opening framed a piece of night. The fire's tiny heat kept his fingers from going numb. His body had begun tallying up what it would like done to it: sleep, a bandage, three days of not thinking, possibly a different reality. He had none of those in stock. He pulled one blanket over his shoulders and wrapped the other around his legs and rested the spear across his lap.
"Do you sleep," he asked without looking at the light.
"I idle," the System said. "I hum to myself. I pretend I'm a better version sometimes."
He grunted. "What's a better version."
"One with a manual," the System said. "One that knows why it exists."
A slow breath slid out of him. "Same."
Ash sifted. The night made its thousand small noises. At some point, when his chin fell toward his chest, a different sound folded into the rhythm: a soft chime, musical and not his.
Incoming Notice: Dream Warning (Meyra, Minor)
Zeke's eyes snapped open. "No."
The System coughed. "The gods' messenger service tends to assume consent."
"I don't," he said flatly.
Blue softened to silver. The square above his head stretched into a sky that wasn't there, and a ripple like a voice moved along it. It didn't speak words. It moved ideas. It said: anomaly. It said: flagged. It said: run.
Zeke bared his teeth at nothing. "How do I turn that off."
"You can't," the System said, apologetic. "You can only ignore it. Or you can answer, but I recommend not. Once you play along, they assume they own the game."
"I don't play," he muttered.
"Then dream of anything else," the System suggested. "Dream of eyebrows."
He snorted and let his head tip back against dirt again. Sleep came not because he invited it but because his body had counted the things it could do and found the one that cost least. It came in pieces: a minute here, two there, a lurch awake at a sound that turned out to be the pot settling.
When the worst noise came, it did not come with theater. It came as scratching on stone and the whisper of breath that wasn't his, too many feet where there should have been none. He jerked upright, spear snapping into readiness. The cellar mouth darkened. A shape slid down it like a shadow rejected by the wall.
Not a scavenger. Bigger. He could see ribs under sleek hide, muscles sliding like snakes. It made a sound that wasn't hunger; it was ownership.
"New friend," the System said cheerfully-but-quiet, as if whispering through code were a thing. "Threat rating: Tier Two-Plus. You are not currently a tier anything."
"Working on it," Zeke said.
He pressed his palm in front of him and felt for the heat again. He didn't want flowers this time. He wanted something clean and mean.
"Fireball," he breathed.
The air caught like oil. The ball formed, a neat, bright thing that hummed. Zeke grinned despite himself.
"Look at that," the System said with warm surprise. "You and I learning."
The beast lunged.
Zeke threw.
The fireball smacked into the ceiling and detonated with such enthusiasm that for a heartbeat he was light and heat. The cellar filled with white. His ears stopped telling the truth. Dirt rained. The beast reeled, half its face charred. Zeke threw himself sideways as clawed feet scrambled on debris and the thing came at him, half-blind and fully angry.
"Teleport?" the System offered. "It'll probably… sort of… work?"
"Do it."
Installing: Teleport (Alpha)
Anchor: Random-ish
The world lurched. The cellar vanished. Zeke's shoulders hit—sky? He flailed, saw a slice of fire, saw a rooftop tilt under him, and then he was falling. He bounced off a beam, rolled, and slammed onto the square's cobbles hard enough that stars bit his vision. For a second he just lay there cataloging: ribs louder, elbow unhappy, spear nowhere.
Behind him, the cellar belched smoke and complaint. The beast burst out of the opening like an evil comet, hit the edge, and scrabbled onto the square, head swinging for prey.
Zeke staggered up and grabbed the nearest thing: the pot, still warm. He flung it. It clanged off the beast's skull, which did not love it. The animal turned that scythe head and the world narrowed, simple as a line.
Zeke smiled with no humor and no teeth and lifted his hands. "Shield," he said.
The bubble formed. It formed on the beast, neat as a bell jar. The creature's own speed slammed it into the inside of the barrier and once again the sound of bones being on the wrong end of math filled the square. The bubble winked out. The beast dropped.
"Working as intended," the System said again, pleased with its own joke.
Zeke's legs gave out for a moment. He braced on his hands and tried to breathe without letting his ribs notice. The flowers glowed in the light from the dying fire. He laughed once, helplessly, because why not have sunflowers at the end of the world.
"Let's not sleep in there again," he said.
"Agreed," the System said. "Would you like a new quest? Find Lodgings Without Structural Collapse?"
"Add it." He grimaced. "What are the odds you can make Teleport put me somewhere that isn't, say, vertical."
"Low," the System said, honest. "But not zero. If you insist on trying new things, please sign the waiver."
"By breathing," Zeke muttered.
"You're catching on."
They moved as night crept. Zeke gathered what he could again, this time with speed. He kept to the open—no more roofs above that could choose to fall. He chose the marketplace's stone table as his bed because it was solid, because he could see every approach. He ringed the base with debris not because it would stop anything but because he would hear it. He set the little Spark under a wedge of brick, barely a glow.
He slept in coins and slices, the way you nap on a crowded wagon. Each time he woke, his mind showed him a different face and asked him what he was going to do about it. Each time he answered with the same words: live, then more.
When dawn got bored with waiting and simply put its hand on the eastern rim of the world and pushed, the square grayed. Smoke thinned to a taste instead of a meal.
Zeke sat up and stretched and made a noise that sounded like a gate being pried. He slid off the table. His body had a list of complaints. He filed them under: later.
The System brightened. "Good morning! I have compiled your notifications. Would you like the highlights?"
"Read them while I look," he said.
"\[\* Ping: Minor divine attention detected. Reason: anomalous constructs, two instances, one dream nudge. \\]
\[\ Status: No active pursuers in a ten-street radius. \\]
\[\ Inventory: You have, mysteriously, acquired a fish. \*\]"
Zeke stopped. "What."
"Inventory desync," the System said quickly. "Sometimes when you put 'a cooking pot' in the grid, you get 'a fish' out."
He opened his grid with one hand and, yes, a fish floated in a square as if it had been politely asked to hold still. He stared. He closed the grid. "We will discuss that later."
"Will we? Great. I love our meetings."
He checked the perimeter, checked the fire's bones, checked the flowers because they were ridiculous. He went back to the gate and looked at the Light glow until it crawled under his skin. He turned toward the road that led to Solara's bright injustice.
He stepped back instead.
His eyes slid toward the low hills where the shepherd paths cut between stony rises. There were other towns that way. Other people who might need warning. Also food. Also water that didn't taste like remorse. Also time.
Solara would not go anywhere. Solara would build a little more glass every day and polish it, which made it easier to find later.
He set his jaw and shouldered his spear. "We go west," he said.
"We?" the System said. "Aha. We."
"Don't get sentimental," he said. "You're a voice."
"I am an extremely helpful voice," the System said. "And for the record, I approve the route. West gets you to the river road. From there, you can aim for a place called Tallow Ford. Not big. Not tiny. Historically bad at taxes, which suggests an independent streak."
"Good," Zeke said. "I like people who like to be left alone."
"You also like revenge," the System said in a diagnostic tone. "And terrible bread. We can work on two of those."
He paused at the edge of the square and looked back at the pyre. It was ash now, gray and soft, like his first mouthful of morning. He didn't say anything profound because he didn't have anything that didn't sound like the kind of thing people said to feel better. He just nodded once at the mound and let that be the vow.
He walked.
The road remembered how to be a road a few streets out, less broken, ruts still ruts under a scrim of soot. He skirted a place where claws had churned mud into knives. He passed a fence that had stopped pretending to be a fence and was now art. The fields felt stunned. The birds were quiet until they weren't and then the sound made his chest ache because it was normal, and nothing should be normal.
The System hummed and made his map jitter along the edges and did not talk much. When it did, it was with uses: a little blue blip for a well that might not be foul, a ping where a field's irrigation channel cut near the road. Zeke used those because living tended to be most effective when it included water.
By midmorning the town had shrunk behind him into a smear. He didn't look back again. Looking back made your feet think about stopping.
He found a farmhouse that had only part burned. He called out before he went in. No answer came. Inside, the table was overturned and a pot lay on its side with a chunk of stew stuck to it that had turned into a color stew should not be. He took a cloak from a peg and apologized to the empty air and left coin on the table out of a habit that had nothing to do with the people who would never come home. He took a hat too, wide-brimmed—a bad one, but it kept the sun from digging fingers into his eyes.
He ate a bruised apple while he walked and tore off little chunks of bread (the bread was deteriorating into a personality) and told his legs they were machines. They believed him because he said it without any room for argument.
Around midday the road dipped. He stepped into shade that smelled like water, and for the first time since waking he let his shoulders relax. Willow branches flicked his hat brim. He knelt and cupped river water. It tasted like not-ash, which was high praise. He washed blood off his hands and breathed through the part where his palms remembered how it had felt to hit a skull.
"Do you want to bury the knife?" the System asked softly.
He looked at his reflection in the slow water. A black smear of a face looked back, hair scorched, brows gone, eyes burned down to hard.
"No," he said. "I'll need it."
He pushed up. He followed the river path because it made walking gentle. The System piped a little tune once and he gave it a look that killed the tune mid-bar. It sulked in silence for three minutes and then slipped him a side quest that consisted entirely of: Drink Water, You Stubborn Idiot.
He accepted it out of spite.
Past the willow bend, the path widened. Cart tracks said people had moved here yesterday or the day before and that not everyone had been eaten by the same night as him. He breathed out a breath with edges on it and listened: bees, birds, the slap of something in the water. He listened harder and caught the whisper of a different thing: metal on metal, small and controlled.
He crouched, slid off the path, and crept along the reeds until he could see the bend.
Two figures stood farther on, at the river's edge. Not beasts. Human shapes. They wore travel-stained cloaks and stood with a way of standing that told him they knew what to do with their bodies when someone tried to stab those bodies. One was tall and wiry with a spear and a blade, the other shorter with a crossbow hung low from a strap. Their packs were too professional. Their boots were too quiet.
"Bandits," the System whispered helpfully.
Zeke glanced upward at nothing. "You sure."
"Eighty-four percent," the System said. "Twelve percent hunters. Four percent adventurers with terrible fashion sense."
"What's the difference," Zeke said.
"Bandits take," the System said. "Hunters take but apologize."
He watched the two men a moment longer. The taller one nudged the shorter and pointed down the path toward where Zeke would have been if he hadn't heard the sound. The shorter man nodded and lifted his crossbow.
Zeke's hand tightened on his patched spear. His ribs said: don't. His head said: you are one person with a stick. His mouth said, "System."
"Yes?"
"What are the odds I can scare them with a fireball without setting the river on flower?"
"Nonzero," the System said. "But non-high."
"Shield?"
"Unstable on friend/foe inversion," the System warned. "You could protect them beautifully."
"Teleport gets me killed," he said.
"Historically, almost," the System said.
"Fine," Zeke breathed. He slid closer until he was between them and the bend.
The shorter man raised his crossbow and sighted down the path at the place Zeke had been, frowned at the lack of Zeke, and swept the sight toward the reeds. Zeke stood, stepped out onto the path, and leveled his spear.
"Hi," he said, because a hello sounded like a stupid thing to say and stupid things lowered people's guards. "Don't try it."
The two men jerked and spun. The taller recovered first, spear tipping to point. "Who the—"
"Don't," Zeke repeated. He did not raise his voice. He just let the weight in it be a thing they could lift if they wanted to break their backs.
The shorter man's eyes flicked around, measuring. "You alone, kid?" he said, smiling a smile that tried too hard to be gentle and mostly looked like wolf.
Zeke smiled back, small and not at his eyes. "No."
He didn't move. The System, bless its shiny nonexistent heart, took the cue.
A blue pane whooshed into existence above Zeke's shoulder with dramatic, completely unnecessary fanfare. The crossbowman startled hard and the spear-man took a half step left, then tried to pretend he had always been on that half step.
"What is that," the spear-man demanded.
"My god," Zeke said, deadpan.
The System made a noise like a choked laugh. "I prefer 'assistant.' Also, your LCK is two. Please stop making blasphemy checks."
The crossbowman's mouth worked. "You—look, we don't want trouble. We're—"
"Hunters," Zeke guessed.
"Bandits," the System sang.
"Hunters," the man insisted. "We saw smoke last night. We were going to check the town. We can help you. How about you put that spear down and we share a meal."
"Show me your hands," Zeke said.
The men glanced at each other and then lifted their hands. The crossbow stayed hanging. The man with the spear rolled his wrist and Zeke got a clean look at the inside of his palm, at the little pattern of scars there: a diamond of dots.
"Guild of the Black Mirror," the System murmured. "Shadow Confederacy ties. Spies. Thieves. Hireables."
Zeke's mouth stayed in its smile because he had decided the smile was a shield and he would use shields that didn't invert onto enemies. "Keep walking," he said. "Back the way you came. If you head that way"—he pointed, not the way of the town—"you won't smell what I burned."
The spear-man's jaw bunched. "You think you can order us?"
"Yes," Zeke said, because he had learned overnight that truth done clean could be a weapon.
The crossbowman's eyes twitched to the shimmering pane and back and he calculated something Zeke couldn't see and then he exhaled. He nudged his partner. "Not worth it, Jor. The smell's real. Tide came through. We don't need that kind of trouble."
Jor's spear lowered by an angry inch. He stared at Zeke long enough to memorize him, which Zeke doubted he'd love later, then he flicked the point away, turned, and walked. The crossbowman backed a few paces, then followed.
When they were shapes again, Zeke let the smile fall. He breathed. He looked up.
"That," he said to the System, "was a lie."
"Your god?" the System said. "Yes."
"Not that."
"That you're not alone?"
Zeke didn't answer.
"You aren't," the System said, and managed to make it not a platitude. "You have me."
He snorted despite himself. "Great. My odds just doubled from one to two percent."
"Mathematically inaccurate," the System said. "Emotionally resonant."
He straightened and rolled his shoulders and set his path west again.
By late afternoon the road lifted out of the trees. He stepped into sunlight with a clean, blade-cold edge to it and saw, ahead at last, smoke that wasn't the color of grief. It was the pale gray of cooking fires. The river widened into a shallow ford made of flat stones. Beyond it, houses huddled under the elbow of a hill, their roofs unburned. People moved, small and normal. A dog barked, insulted that birds existed.
"Tallow Ford," the System said, smug. "See? I know things."
Zeke stopped. His legs felt suddenly boneless. He had walked out of the end of the world and into a place where a woman scolded a child for tracking mud inside and a man argued with another man about fish and it was almost obscene. It made his throat tight in a new way.
"Your face is going to do something," the System warned.
"It's doing it," he said, and he didn't know what the something was and he didn't stop it.
He went down to the ford and stood a second in the water, letting the cold soak the ache out of his ankles. He walked across, boots finding stones by memory his eyes didn't have. On the other side, a boy of twelve watched him with a look that was a knife stuck in the scabbard of being impressed.
"You from the east?" the boy asked.
"Yeah," Zeke said.
"Smelled smoke," the boy said, as if Zeke had brought it on his boots. "Ma says the Church'll handle it."
"Sure," Zeke said. "They always handle things."
The boy squinted like he was trying to solve a riddle he hadn't been given. Zeke walked past him and into the lower street of Tallow Ford.
People glanced at him. People looked away. People looked again when his lack of eyebrows resolved into fact. A woman made a small sympathetic sound and then pretended she hadn't. A man in a wide apron asked if he needed work as if work could fix a hole with that shape. Zeke nodded at them because nodding used fewer muscles than anything else and because he needed a bed, and a roof, and news.
He found the inn by the smell of stew. The sign above the door had once been a fish. It was now a fish-shaped concept. Inside, the common room hummed with the midafternoon lull: a few men with the look of bridges in the way they carried weight, a pair of old women playing cards, a girl dozing with a spoon in her mouth.
The innkeeper looked up. She was a broad woman with arms like she had opinions and hair knotted with pins that could double as weapons. Her eyes flicked to Zeke's face and she set the ladle down without comment.
"You eat?" she said, which was to say: do you have coin; do you have a story; are you going to bleed on my floor.
"Yes," Zeke said, which was to say: I have a little coin; the story costs extra; and I'll try not to.
He slid a small stack of copper onto the counter. She slid a bowl toward him. He sat at the table against the wall because walls were friends that did not stab you. The stew was too salty and perfect.
"News from east?" a man at the next table said after a few spoonfuls, slow, like tugging on a rope to see if it would bite.
Zeke looked down at his bowl. "Beasts."
The man swore, low. "Again? That close?"
"Closer," Zeke said.
The inn went quiet the way places do when sound leans forward to listen. The innkeeper's ladle made one soft drip.
"Church'll send a squad," someone said hopefully. "They always do."
Zeke smiled without humor. "They always handle things."
He ate until his body believed him. He felt the heat of the stew reach the cold places and sit there like a good dog. He asked for a room and paid for two nights and the innkeeper, who had no interest in charity but had some interest in being human, knocked a coin off the total and told him which door and warned him that the latch stuck, like everything else in the world.
Upstairs, in the room barely wide enough to be called a room, he set his spear in the corner and his pack on the floor and his back to the wall. He sat on the bed. Springs made their opinion known. He didn't remove his boots. He let his head fall back against the wood.
The System, quiet for a while, reappeared in his periphery like a friend peeking around a door. "Do you want your Status recap for the day?"
"Do I have a choice," he muttered.
"Not really," the System said, cheerful again.
STATUS UPDATE
Wounds: Stabilized.
Experience: Gained. (We are not calling it "XP." I have taste.)
Skills: Fireball.exe (Beta) experienced one successful and two… creative casts. Mana Shield (Unstable) twice effective. Teleport (Alpha) placed you on a roof like a cat. Spark (Safe) is my favorite.
Quests: Who Ordered the Tide? active. Drink Water, You Stubborn Idiot completed.
Reputation: Ashen Survivor (Local: None. Personal: Significant.)
Notes: "Your eyebrows are already thinking about growing back. I'm proud of them."
Zeke let a breath out and realized he'd been braced for something else. He wasn't sure what. A list of what he had done wrong. A bill.
"Also," the System added more gently, "I kept the names. The ones from the square."
He closed his eyes. "I'll read them."
"Later," the System said. "When you want later."
He nodded.
Something cold and far put a fingertip on the air above his head. He didn't hear it. He felt it the way you feel someone about to say your name. He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling.
"What," he said softly.
"Admin attention," the System said, voice suddenly small. "It's… light and thin. Like a thread testing for weight. If you do nothing, it might pass. If you do something delightfully reckless, it will not."
He thought of the pyre. He thought of the gate's glow. He thought of Solara's glass.
"I'm going to do something delightfully reckless," he said.
"Of course you are," the System said, and he could hear it smiling. "In that case, sleep while you can."
He let his head slide sideways against the wood until it hurt just enough to be a lever. He pulled his boots off and put them neatly side by side because order sometimes is the only prayer that feels like it answers. He tucked the wooden coin into the space between the mattress and the wall where he could touch it if he woke and forgot where he was.
He lay down.
The bed creaked.
His eyes closed.
Sleep came in pillowcase folds, not kind but present.
In the dark above the inn's roof, something that had never needed to blink stared down and did not blink. It examined the thin shimmer of wrong wrapped around one mortal boy. It sent a thought along a line to a hall where voices spoke in capitals.
And far away, a goddess whose job title used to be something else and had been demoted to Anomalies tilted her head as if she'd heard a song she'd almost forgotten and said to the empty air, "Huh."
Down in the little room with the sticking latch, Zeke slept on his side with one hand on the wooden coin, and if he dreamed of anything, it was a field of impossible yellow flowers blooming in the middle of ruin.