System Report:

  Friend

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  The inside of the tailor’s shop looked as though Time had nipped out for a smoke and forgot to ever come back. Marked cloth lay spread across the tables, moth-eaten and halfway cut; the rusted scissors didn’t lay far off, hastily put down alongside a handful of needles; some of which’s brethren still pinned up a wallpaper of faded and miscolored notes, hundreds of them, speaking of former glory when business was still booming; and when the tea-cups, five of them, had been put down on like any other day, just never to be picked up again—their owners, like Time itself, having never returned to this place.

  In their stead, Ashenmoor’s eternal damp had moved in, making itself at home until every wall leaned under the weight of its residency. Bolts of fabric—once proud, upright citizens of the textile world—slumped across warped shelves like exhausted aristocrats after a long ball; their fates no longer to host dinners, but dynasties of mildew.

  The air smelled of rot, iron, and the faint, lingering hope that someone might still step in to browse its wares. Just, perhaps, not in this manner…

  ***

  The floor was a tapestry of ripped linen and more blood than any floor was meant to handle—it had soaked into the boards, staining them in an even darker shade of grim decay. Gami’s heart, having been beating somewhere in the pit of her stomach ever since she got a proper look at her friend’s injuries, left her in no state to notice.

  “You idiot,” she hissed, hands frantically rummaging through every pocket and pouch on her own tattered self. Each one yielded a fresh disappointment.

  Desmond was always supposed to be the party’s medic, but with the boy being gods-know-where, Gami was forced to lean on the self-reliance that’d kept her alive all these years—in the Wilds, no one was going to patch up an urchin but herself.

  But even during the harshest winters of her youth, Gami had never seen wounds like these. Not on someone still clinging to life, at least.

  “You shouldn’t have kept your mouth shut if it was this bad,” she continued between clenched teeth, her questing fingers uncovering a few despondent herbs and a salve that was more soup than balm. None of which, she suspected, fell under the category of capable of resurrecting the dead.

  Yenna was barely breathing anymore. Each shallow, wavering sip of air sounded like it might be her last.

  “She is done for already,” came a voice from deeper inside the room—a part of the room that, evidently, specialised in gloom and unsolicited commentary. “You’re just wasting time with this meaningless farce.”

  “I told you to go ahead,” Gami bit back, doing her best to focus on the gaping wound in front of her rather than the gaping fool behind her.

  “Oh, trust me, I’d love to,” the young man said. He clicked his tongue and massaged his temples, as though the real injury in the room was his headache. “But I can’t shake the feeling that doing exactly that would be a spectacularly terrible idea.”

  A nearby chair gave its final groan as the room’s last occupant, the girl in the pink sweater, stopped swinging her legs. So far, her eyes hadn’t left the dying patient, or Gami’s dogged attempts at keeping her from doing just that—dying—since they entered the building. Nor had she uttered a word. Until now.

  “Because we are friends, right?” she asked. “And friends don’t leave friends behind.”

  “Sure,” the man said, rolling his eyes with such exaggerated commitment it was a wonder they didn’t roll straight out of his skull. “Because friends would absolutely keep each other in the dark about critical, life-altering information.”

  “I already told you—”

  “What? That I should ignore the System and listen to you instead? Don’t kid yourself. The only useful thing about you—the only reason I keep you around—is your connection to the System.”

  Correction: even after the girl stopped swinging her legs, there had, until that moment, been a series of faint creaks and groans from the chair she occupied—the natural sounds of someone attempting to express emotional turmoil through the medium of restless fidgeting. Now, even that fell silent, leaving the room filled with nothing but the rain tapping at the windows, bravely attempting to fill the void.

  “I guess…” she quietly agreed after a moment, and the sheer pitifulness of her voice made even Gami—who was doing her very best to pretend neither of them existed while she tried to keep Yenna’s insides from becoming outsides—feel a pang of guilt.

  Not that the man noticed.

  “And as for you,” he continued, efficiently redirecting his annoyance toward Gami, “I don’t know where you’re from, but isn’t it customary to show a bit of gratitude to someone who saved your life? I still don’t understand why you’re being so dodgy about—”

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  Maybe it was the blood smeared all over, her imposing frame, or the sheer speed with which it happened, but his sentence was nearly sliced in half as her head snapped towards him.

  “—about what the System is saying…” He caught himself just before his voice cracked.

  She felt like an absolute idiot. A world-class, award-winning idiot.

  Then again, surely—surely—if he had another one of those miraculous flasks, he wouldn’t just stand there pontificating while someone bled out on the floor.

  “Do you have more of them?” she gravely asked, voice sharp and hands warm—too warm—from trying to convince Yenna’s blood to stay where it belonged. “More of the potions that could save her?”

  She saw the moment his attention shifted, the tiny click behind his eyes as he looked down at Yenna and evaluated her not as a person but as a sort of unfortunate biological inconvenience. To him, she wasn’t a dying friend, just rapidly cooling meat.

  “It seems,” the man said, in the slow, condescending tone usually reserved for explaining basic arithmetic to a rock, “that you’ve misunderstood something. One of those potions is worth more money than any First Layer Delver could ever dream of. I didn’t give you one out of the goodness of my heart. I gave it to you out of my own convenience.”

  “She is dying!”

  “And I fail to see how that is my—”

  The rest of his sentence drowned beneath the firm, indignant screech of a chair being shoved back. The girl in pink had stood up. Now, without so much as a glance in his direction she marched over to Gami. She reached into the pouch of her oversized sweater, and before Gami could protest, process, or even blink properly, something was pressed into her hands.

  A shimmering glass flask. Polished. Corked. Sealed with wax and glowing faintly with magical promise.

  “Hey! When did you—” the man squawked, patting down his own pockets as though the potion might magically reappear out of embarrassment. But the girl was already heading for the door.

  “Don’t treat them as tools as well,” she quietly said as she shoved it open, the drum of rain wasting no time filling the tailor’s shop. “You’re not getting out of here on your own.”

  “And where exactly are you going?” the man demanded, having pushed himself off the wall he’d been leaning on. He was glaring dark daggers in her back.

  “Out,” she said. Then paused. Her fingers lingered on the handle as though it might offer emotional support if squeezed firmly enough. “I… I think I dropped Wallace somewhere out there. I’m going to get him. That’s what friends are for, right?” She glanced back over her shoulder, eyes as hollow and emotionless as the rest of the room. “Not that I expect you to care. It’s not like we were ever really friends in the first place.”

  ***

  Annabell walked solemnly down the soaked street, every absent-minded kick of her foot sending up a despondent splash from nearby puddles. She was alone again, just like she’d always been. At least she would have seemed that way to anyone watching—to anyone who didn’t know Annabell Smith.

  “I know, Wallace,” she murmured, addressing the plushie tucked deep inside her hoodie like a stowaway with tenure. “I would never actually lose you. I’m not that careless. You’re my friend, after all…”

  She paused at that same corner they’d rounded earlier, when she was still being carried around like a bad puppy that had misbehaved. She’d been watching them then, the two Delvers trailing behind. One of them staggering, wobbling like a puppet with half its strings snapped, the other holding her up with a desperation that suggested the universe had given them far too much responsibility and absolutely no training.

  “Would you carry me like that too, Wallace? If I got hurt?” she asked him softly. “Would you worry and fight and do foolish things if I were in danger? It seemed… nice, you know. Not the hurting but having someone on your side like that.”

  She scratched her cheek in a small, uncertain gesture, then let her arm fall limply back to her side, defeated by gravity, rain, and everything else that liked to pile up on a person at the worst possible moment.

  “It’s my own fault, isn’t it?” she continued, trudging onward as the rain tried its very best to wash her off the street. “Trying to force him to be our friend. He didn’t want that. He just wants to leave. But I… I just wanted to know what it was like. Even for a little while…”

  With a small, soggy snivel, she wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve—which was already so damp that the gesture accomplished nothing except moving the problem around.

  “Damned cold…” she grumbled, as though the weather were solely responsible for everything wrong with her life. “And damned annoying messages.”

  Because there they were again—the hovering, spectral textboxes that had been stalking her since she’d been unceremoniously dropped into this deeply unpleasant slice of reality:

  [Not your friend…]

  [Doesn’t care about you…]

  [Just a tool…]

  [Don’t fool yourself…]

  “I don’t like this place, Wallace,” she said, lifting her eyes toward the skyline where thunder stitched jagged seams through the clouds. Once, a church had stood proudly there. Now, there was only a sickly green Core, glowing resentfully in the distance. “Should we go and end this, you and me?”

  She tightened her grip on the strap of the leather satchel she’d… acquired through the traditional method of borrowing-without-asking. The bleeding woman on the floor hadn’t seemed to need it, and its mere shape had tickled the Gremlin part of her brain.

  “Annabell and Wallace,” she gave the plushie a reassuring squeeze. “Just like it’s always been.”

  ***

  Scholarly Entry #Z91-120-Hf2:

  Friend (n.)

  A friend, in the weary understanding of those who live in worlds that grind people down like old stone steps, may be described as:

  Someone who chooses to stand beside you when it would be easier—safer, wiser—not to.

  In harsher territories, where the rain never quite leaves and the dark seems to watch back, friendship is not loud. It does not arrive with trumpets. It is a small thing, often unnoticed until it is gone. A hand that steadies you. A voice that reminds you that you matter, even when you’re certain you don’t.

  And those who have known friendship, true friendship, know the world is a colder place without even one person willing to say: I’m here.