System Report

  The Calling

  Loading…

  There was no reason behind it. The way she kept pounding her fists against the stone floor. The way her fingers scrabbled for purchase, searching for an edge that wasn’t there. Her nails splintered, her knuckles split, and still she continued, propelled by that deep, insistent feeling that Something Down There was calling her.

  It wasn’t a voice, precisely. Voices are polite enough to stay in the realm of air and sanity. This was more like gravity. A low, insistent whisper from the dark, suggesting that down there was something important.

  It reached up through her bones and spoke directly to the parts of her that didn’t believe in whispering. It was all that mattered. All that existed.

  Fresh blood smeared her surroundings. Her muscles screamed for rest, her mind begging her to see reason. But she didn’t. Because that something was calling.

  And then—

  A voice. Real, audible, inconveniently sensible, asked:

  “What are you doing?”

  It wasn’t the sort of voice that belonged in a grand prophecy. It was the sort that belonged to a genuinely curious child, wondering why their parent is throwing a tantrum after stubbing their toe on a rogue piece of furniture.

  Gami coughed up a mouthful of blood, which wasn’t nearly as dramatic as she would’ve imagined. Her lungs barely had the strength to propel the liquid past her lips, leaving it to lazily thread down her jaw.

  She was a mess, every breath rasping through her lungs like an old broom sweeping up a dusty cathedral, and the world shimmered and sagged around her. But as she blinked through the haze, she became aware that something within the blur was looking back.

  A pink… bunny?

  No, not quite. A girl. In a bunny-eared sweater. Standing there as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world, head tilted, watching Gami with calm, curious interest.

  Gami stared back. The girl scratched her nose. Somewhere, deep inside the hollowed-out remains of her common sense, a small voice whispered, with grim certainty, that she had finally crossed the border—the one marked Welcome to Madness. Population: You.

  And Gami, who was in no position to argue with anyone, least of all her own sanity, had to admit that it sounded about right as she collapsed to the floor.

  ***

  Above ground, where the rain still fell as if it had something to prove…

  Yenna saw it happen, and she did nothing about it. Not out of malice. Malice takes planning, and planning requires breath. She possessed neither. As of that moment, doing something was simply a luxury her body couldn’t afford.

  Through the curtain of fog and falling rain, she could only watch—watch as the first blurred outline of a man charged forward, swinging a cudgel with more force than finesse.

  Alana slipped under the blow and drove her dagger home.

  It slid between the man’s ribs and then out again, leaving a darker liquid to arc through the rain.

  Yenna saw the cudgel clatter to the ground, saw the man topple, dead before he joined it—but she also saw the falter in Alana’s step as she staggered back, the exhaustion creeping in like an unwanted guest.

  Before the woman could recentre herself, Mari’s desperate warning cut through the air.

  The cudgel-wielding man hadn’t charged in alone. Another burly figure had managed to grab hold of the girl, but even as she kicked and bit and clawed at his arm, her scream hadn’t been out of concern for herself.

  Two women were sprinting through the fog, boots kicking up judgemental puddles. They weren’t warriors, or even particularly athletic. But they had that grim, practical determination of people who have long since decided that numbers would be their plan. Alana slashed one of them across the face, and that did stop her—for the full half-second it took for the other woman to crash into Alana with her full weight.

  Yenna saw it all. Every stumble, every desperate strike, every failure. She saw as Alana went down, she saw her get swallowed by the crowd of shapes as more of the townsfolk came running through the mist, and she did nothing to help.

  It all happened too fast.

  By the time Yenna found her breath again, it was already over.

  Pressed against the crumbling wall of an abandoned shop, her heart hammering loud enough to make her teeth chatter, soaked to her bones, and barely hid by the fog and shadows, Yenna could only watch as Alana and Mari were dragged across the town square. As they were dragged toward a church that loomed like a hungering behemoth in the distance—Alana kicking and screaming until a pragmatic fist made her go still.

  The rain continued its steady assault on Ashenmoor, washing away the sins of the bodies still scattered across the town square—left behind and forgotten.

  The air hissed between Yenna’s teeth as she folded to the ground.

  “Damn it,” she wheezed, one hand weakly punching at her thigh as if that would make her trembling legs cooperate, while the other clutched at her side. Warm blood steadily soaked through her clothes. “Damn it all.”

  She could barely stay upright, her companions were somewhere between gone and probably being enthusiastically murdered, and, as if the universe had decided that wasn’t enough, that infernal timer kept ticking away in the corner of her vision:

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  00:05:17…

  00:05:16…

  Every disappearing second echoed through her skull, a nauseating rhythm alongside her racing heart.

  Though, not nearly as nauseating as the sound that came to replace them:

  From the church ahead came the low thrum of a rising chant—a sermon, slowly spreading through the rain until it reached even Yenna. The sound swelled, layered with the rich aroma of incense and the less pleasant scent of blood. They filtered through the ever-present tang of the sea, as though the ocean itself had shown up to witness the spectacle

  And yet, beneath the exhaustion and the pain, something flickered inside Yenna—a tiny, stubborn spark of anger. Not the quick, hot kind that burns and fades, but the deep, smouldering sort that settles in the gut like a promise.

  “As if I’d let it end like this,” she hissed into the never-ending rain, shrugging the leather satchel from her shoulder. It hit the ground with a despondent thud.

  “You better have put something good in here, old man,” she continued between sharp breaths, tearing through its contents with all the finesse of a starving animal.

  Something broke beneath her fingers—of course something broke—and a sharp sting told her that the something had been made of glass. Blood mingled with rain as pages, notes, and old journals spilled out, wilting under the downpour.

  “You better have put something damned good in here…” she growled, as if sheer resentment might conjure up a miracle.

  Then came the sound. A sharp cry from the direction of the church—the kind that goes straight through bone and takes up residence somewhere behind your eyes. Yenna flinched, head snapping up.

  The rain carried the faint traces of weeping, of pleading, words lost to distance but not their meaning.

  “Mari, just—”

  Another scream cut her off.

  Scooping up the satchel—wet, battered, and bleeding in sympathy—Yenna stopped thinking and stumbled into motion, legs protesting every step as she half-ran, half-fell toward the church.

  She had to do something. And she had to do it now.

  ***

  “Aren’t you supposed to catch her when she falls like that?”

  Lionel, who had taken the far more reasonable approach of not cartwheeling headfirst toward unidentified cries at the end of a dark tunnel, stopped in the doorway to survey the situation. The scene inside the stone chamber was, regrettably, exactly the sort of situation he’d come to expect from his short time travelling with Annabell.

  A young woman—large, scarred, and dressed in the scuffed armour of some dead beast—had just toppled over, either from blood loss, exhaustion, or simply because time had decided it was her turn. And, naturally, instead of catching her, Annabell had—with impressive reflexes—sidestepped neatly out of the way and let the woman acquaint herself directly with the floor.

  “What?” Annabell said, glancing between Lionel and the collapsed adventurer with the kind of wide-eyed innocence that never fooled anyone. “That looked intentional, didn’t it? I thought she was going to pop back up and go, ‘Ha! Fooled you!’ and then, you know, be fine.”

  Lionel sighed, shaking his head. “Remind me never to do a trust-fall exercise near you,” he said, glancing around the small, dim chamber. “Or within a three-mile radius of you.”

  He wasn’t overly concerned about the woman on the floor. She had the look of a Delver. Probably part of whatever doomed expedition had attempted to clear this Dungeon before their arrival. What concerned Lionel more was what she’d been doing here before collapsing—and, tangentially, what Annabell was doing now.

  “What are you—”

  The words died somewhere between trepidation and distaste as his companion, crouching over the fallen woman began, in the most generous of interpretations, conducting an “archaeological excavation” of her belongings.

  Rather than check if she was, say, alive, Annabell seemed far more concerned with determining whether the contents of the woman’s pockets might, in fact, be more useful in her own.

  “Never mind,” Lionel said in the weary tone of a man who had fully accepted that if anyone was going to figure out their situation, it would be himself.

  So, to the background symphony of Annabell’s not-so-innocent whistling and the steady, unhelpful presence of impending doom—

  00:04:21…

  00:04:20…

  —he turned his attention to the chamber itself. It couldn’t be a coincidence that they’d ended up here of all places.

  The walls were lined with a curious array of half-glass, half-mechanical baubles: glowing, ticking things that looked like they’d been designed by someone who understood neither glass nor mechanics—or, perhaps, understood them in ways mortals couldn’t comprehend. Rune-etched gyros and tiny gears clicked and spun at their hearts, suspended in the shimmering, ominous glow of raw magic.

  Whyever the scenario had led them here; it was hidden somewhere among these shining curiosities.

  He could hear it as much as feel it.

  Beneath the thousand tiny clicks and whirs—like a very punctual swarm of insects—there was another sound. Something low and deep, thrumming just at the edge of hearing. The kind of sound that you didn’t so much listen to as feel creeping along your spine.

  Every so often, the baubles gave a faint shimmer, a flicker of light that pulsed in rhythm with that hidden vibration. Not random, not mechanical—responsive. As if something vast and unseen was stretching its limbs nearby, yawning itself awake after a very long, very unpleasant sleep.

  Lionel’s eyes drifted downward, to the rune-etched floor—to the streaks of blood smeared across stone, to the desperate gouges where nails had clawed and broken, as if someone had been trying very hard to get through.

  The question was just, why…

  “Whoa!” Annabell’s startled yelp snapped him out of it.

  He turned to find that, in the midst of her nefarious prospecting, Annabell had been caught red-handed. Or rather, her wrist had been, gripped desperately by the half-dead Delver on the floor.

  The woman’s eyes were open—wide, bloodshot, and staring straight through them both like someone listening to a song only she could hear.

  “They are calling for it,” she rasped, voice distant and hollow. “Before She can awake… they are calling for it. Anything to prevent Her return.”

  Lionel’s mouth opened to ask who they were, but before the question could make the leap from thought to sound, a single, heavy BONG resonated through his chest.

  Somewhere, directly above their heads, a single church bell had just tolled.

  ***

  Yenna’s heart thundered in her chest—not the polite sort of thudding that reminds you you’re alive, but the sort that sounds like it’s trying to tunnel its way out of this nightmare you’re in. Her stomach had done its best to tie itself into a knot, and the cloying taste of blood, burnt incense, and panic clung to her senses.

  And yet—curiously, traitorously—her mind was perfectly clear. It was the sort of terrifying clarity one gets when all the fog lifts and leaves you with the sinking realization that the world is unravelling beneath your feet.

  Her entrance into the church had not been one for the ballads. She’d considered something dramatic—kicking in the doors, smashing through a window, making a statement—but in the end she’d gone with the sensible option: she’d simply slipped inside. Nobody had noticed.

  By the time she left the rain behind, the ceremony was already reaching its climax. The chanting was deafening—a polite way of saying she was far too late to do anything at all.

  Mari lay on the floor, perfectly still—no longer screaming. Above her stood the priest, elderly and trembling with holy excitement, knife raised high and still dripping in that calm, certain way knives do when they have been asked to do unpleasant things.

  Around them, the townsfolk chanted. It rose and rose until it seemed as if the building itself was singing.

  From somewhere that had once been close but now felt as though it belonged to another life, came Alana’s voice—a raw, ragged thing that reached Yenna like someone shouting through several layers of regret. “You fucking bastards!” it screamed. “I’ll kill all of you. Every single fucking one of you!”

  Yet above all of it—above prayer, above profanity, above the wet slap of rain against stone—that single bell tolled, and the sound sat in Yenna’s chest like an anchor of frozen lead.

  Mari was dead. The ritual was nearly complete.