System Report:

  Alone

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  Eerie silence lay over the town square. It was the sort of silence that clung to things, weighing down upon the world like a damp blanket, strung up between every drop of rain that hurled itself at the cobblestones in a steady rhythm.

  Ashenmoor’s church, once a grand and self-important lump of architecture convinced of its own permanence, lay in ruins. The detritus of its faith was scattered throughout: holy texts flapped miserably in the wind until the damp got to them and turned their proclamations into soggy stillness; votive candles whose flames had once soared with enough piety to scorch the rafters had fizzled out into waxy amnesia; and here and there, pale extremities of those who had come seeking comfort in a world that no longer listened poked out between the crumbled stones.

  Oddly enough, those deceased might have been the fortunate ones.

  The survivors of Ashenmoor—those who hadn’t yet succumbed to despair, misfortune, or anything with too many teeth—knelt beneath the rain. They sobbed, prayed, and tried very hard not to make eye contact with the creatures of the Depths surrounding them. Scales, fins, claws, and those murky, unseeing eyes were all lifted toward the weeping sky, as though hoping for salvation that would never come.

  Above them, on the church’s last surviving spire, hung the High Priest. Stripped of his monstrous form, he was little more than an old man: thin and tired and a far cry from the towering figure of spiritual authority he’d once been. He swung gently on algae-slick ropes and rusted hooks, an inadvertent symbol of an Ashenmoor that had been drowning long before the sea ever reached it.

  And so, the stillness held, wedged between the wind and the rain that lashed the ruins like repentance.

  At the storm’s heart hovered the Core—a thing that should never have been unearthed, dredged up, poked, prodded, or even remembered. A thing that should never have seen as much as the glow of phosphorescent plankton. Yet here it was, floating in the middle of Ashenmoor’s misery, gnawing its way through the air like a cosmic termite.

  It was no longer the sort of thing that ought to exist in the Underfold’s First Layer—if, indeed, it had ever belonged anywhere that wasn’t locked in a box, placed in another box, sunk into a swamp, and then politely forgotten.

  Given time, it would sink like a cursed ship into the deeper dark, chewing its way downward to feed its growing madness. Given time, it would germinate into an eldritch something-or-other—one of those nameless horrors that even Delvers spoke of only after several drinks and a strong assurance that the lights were staying on. Given time…

  But, of course, such considerations only mattered if the Core were given time, and time was in short supply because on the roof of a nearby building, a silhouette had appeared. A daunting one. The kind outlined by lightning and heavy rain.

  How she’d gotten up there was anyone’s guess—maybe even her own—but there she was, bunny ears flapping wildly in the gale as she rummaged through the satchel slung across her chest. From within, she produced something that should never have either hissed, or ticked, or made any noise that suggested it was thinking about its future in an explosive manner.

  Yet here it was. Hissing. And ticking. Determinedly.

  ***

  Edrik Kain had known the very moment they failed. It wasn’t subtle. You would have had to be dead to miss the tremor that rippled through Ashenmoor as the Core, the very one he personally had supervised as it was buried in the deepest reaches of this rotten world, was hauled back from the Depths.

  That girl he’d so foolishly called apprentice—against all better judgment—had failed, and now, even the dead were subject to its calling.

  He slid from his chair with an undignified gasp, clutching his head as the Core’s presence crushed down upon him. It had been waiting, patiently, the way only eldritch artifacts with very long grudges can wait, for this exact moment. Centuries upon centuries of festering resentment drilled into his skull like a thousand burning screws.

  A thousand artificial phylacteries couldn’t have saved his soul.

  He had been a fool. An expectant, complacent fool. He should have seen this coming. He could have explained—properly, methodically, in detail—what, precisely, the things he had given her were for. But he had assumed she—his apprentice—would understand the intricacies of his craft much like he did; those mundane details that had become to him so routine as to be entirely beneath notice.

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  Alas, to expect any mortal to understand the handiwork of one of the greatest artificers to ever live had been a foolish, fruitless hope. To understand the sublime, delicate, intricate ways his creations were meant to glide together would take a genius of equal calibre—the kind of genius the world may never see again…

  ***

  Most people would have stopped when the device in their hands began whirring, whining, and trembling like an entire colony of murder-wasps that’d just been set on fire. Annabell merely squinted at it, reached into the satchel slung across her chest, fished out another questionable little gizmo, and slapped it onto the top of the already overburdened contraption.

  The whine leapt into a full-bodied howl, loud enough to make even the storm give pause. Its sinister glow jumped from “gradually overheating” into the blinding radiance normally reserved for collapsing stars, and to the acrid stench of degrading sulphur and burning rune-work, the very air around her creation began warping as if preparing to swiftly evacuate the premise.

  Annabell, with all the ceremony of flicking a lazy booger, chucked the entire assemblage over the roof’s edge—directly toward a cluster of twisted sea creatures and a small congregation of terrified townsfolk who were only just beginning to realize that their day was about to get dramatically worse.*

  * (It is around this time that later historians would note that a new footnote had been added to most reputable rulebooks issued by the System: “DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, allow a Gremlin and a sufficiently proficient Artificer to collaborate ON ANYTHING.” The ‘ANYTHING’ was eventually printed in all caps, bolded, and surrounded by a small, illustrated border of panicking stick figures for clarity.)

  Annabell had blown up a great many things since the apocalypse had come knocking on her door. But nothing quite like this.

  It was as if someone had punched a hole straight through reality and reality, affronted, decided to punch back. Out came pure, deafening—the ear-crushing kind of whomp you feel more in your ribcage (and later, as you realize you’re still embarrassingly alive, in your pants)—annihilation.

  Anything within thirty feet of the blast’s epicentre was immediately and unceremoniously disintegrated. A bit farther out, there was a sharp tug as the air leapt sideways to avoid being involved. Then came the shockwave—less “gust of wind” and more “the gods collectively swinging a sledgehammer to make a point.” Buildings became toothpicks. Living beings became stains. Sturdier objects briefly considered resistance and then decided against it.

  And through all of this burned a blinding flash of light like a second sunrise, strong enough to sear even the corneas of the blind.

  When it finally sputtered out, only carnage and a crater large enough to put ponds to shame remained.

  As for the rooftop Annabell had been standing on, it was no longer there. But neither was Annabell.

  Finishing her cartwheel across rain-slick tiles, she caught the aftershock at just the right angle to launch her across a gloomy square that was still reeling from the explosion.

  Mid-flight, both her hands plunged into the satchel strapped across her chest and yanked out the first items her fingers closed around:

  Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal: Activated

  Equipped: Boorish Blueprint & Long-winded Journal

  → Abilities Gained:

  Active: Mind-boggling Schooling

  The pen is mightier than the sword, and these pages have endured more frantic scribbling than any mortal blade. Swing them with sufficient conviction, and no blade shall compare. (Side effects may include enlightenment, blunt trauma, and unsolicited education.)

  Passive: Aim for the Noggin’

  Knowledge enters through the head, one way or another. When striking at the receptacles of wisdom (namely: skulls), accuracy is mysteriously, alarmingly improved.

  Twirling around to lead her flight with her heels, Annabell reassessed her trajectory with the speed and precision of a Gremlin whose definition of “landing strip” was “anything that stops me.”

  In this case: the fat, wobbling neck of a slug-troll she’d spotted squinting in the middle of the rumbling town square, rubbing its eyes with all the innocence of something that genuinely believed the universe had finished being cruel to it.

  It was wrong.

  The boot hitting its neck at terminal velocity would have been sufficiently unpleasant on its own. The small, vicious bundle of pink that followed, descending from the heavens to smack it across the skull with a leatherbound tome, was pure insult layered atop grievous injury.

  Lightning forked overhead, ensuring the scene was forever burned into the memories of anyone close enough to witness the horrific event.

  A colossal slug-troll, ten feet tall and shaped loosely like an ambulatory pudding, reeling backward from an attack so fast it might as well have outraced the nimbus that illuminated it. Its legs tangled in a fallen chunk of belltower, and down it toppled with a startled snarl, flattening anything too slow to flee.

  Its assailant, meanwhile, vaulted backward through the rain—a streak of determined pink skidding across the slick cobbles at the very heart of the Deep Ones’ formation.

  By the time the thunder rolled in, a fat leather journal had already cracked through the shell of one creature’s skull. A rolled-up blueprint—weaponized, as all blueprints dream of being—embedded itself neatly into the eye socket of another.

  By the time the furious cries and warbling battle gargles began to rise, carnage was already waltzing in their midst.