Outside, a low, grating sound that might be a voice. "Wait. He is still in there."
"Our orders were to secure an intruder. Not to interrupt a god." A heavy, hateful rasp answers. He spits the last word as if it tastes foul. "Let the boss handle it."
They are gone.
The relief is a small, quiet space opening in my chest. A space that collapses the moment the door groans open.
The doorway fills with a shape that does not fit. A ruin of weeping skin dragged by limbs that bend the wrong way.
The alchemist in me surfaces, its first instinct to categorise it. But a pity slips through the cracks. The kind one feels for a rare root left to rot in the damp.
It turns to me.
My mind scrambles for a label, a jar to put this horror in. Subject. Anomaly. Failure. Anything to keep it at a clinical distance.
But my body betrays me. My hand lifts, an inch, wanting to smooth the swollen flesh of its brow. The instinct is immediate and irrational, a fierce tenderness that plants my feet to the ground and prepares me to die for this broken thing.
This is madness. What part of me would shield this monster?
Its eyes fix on me. Then they sweep the shed until it sees the man-sized handprint in the dust. It looks from it to my own frail hands, then back to my face.
Its brow, a lump of swollen tissue, knots.
It jabs a finger at the door. Then at me.
Before I can react, it spots a puddle of spilt gruel. It lurches towards it, scooping up a handful of the slop before scrambling to the single grimy window.
It smears the slop across the glass.
One swipe. Two.
The light from the yard is gone. We are sealed in darkness.
It turns back to me, its chest heaving. Its hand extends, palm up.
Its stare is a silent shout, pleading with me to understand. I look at the offered hand, a misshapen paddle of bone, the fingers lost to a single, weeping mass.
Why does a part of me already know what it feels like to hold it?
My hand aches to take its hand. My feet are already turning to run.
I look from its hand to its face. "You don't know me."
It responds with a small, frustrated grunt. It jabs a finger at his chest, then at me. Then it holds up two fingers, pressing them together. We are the same.
Two pieces of meat in an abattoir.
My feet scrape on the stone, a desperate lurch for the exit.
But Nora's mind screams one word. Research.
I grab the satchel. My hands are old and stiff. They betray me. The bag falls, its secrets tumbling out.
The monster freezes. Its eyes are fixed on a page of an open book. It shows a series of sketches. The transformation of a man into a monster. A face, once whole, collapsing inward. An arm ending not in a hand, but in a fleshy, weeping root.
A choked, wounded sound tears from its throat. It scrambles back, its limbs tangling, a frantic scrabble of flesh on stone.
Then it stops. It crawls back. With one misshapen finger, it traces the final, most wretched drawing. The one that looks the most like it.
My hands, shaking with a new and terrible shame, force the books into the satchel.
A distant scrape of iron pulls my head up.
I have to go. Now.
But can these old bones even carry me?
This body is a cage of brittle bone. But it is also a cloak. I will wrap myself in my own frailty. No one ever suspects the broken.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
The thought is a comfort for a second. Then my bones remember fear. Something has entered this place.
I feel the presence of teeth in the dark. A vast awareness that prowls across this entire wretched place.
I'm in its territory.
My skin goes cold. Every shadow in this place has just grown teeth.
The distant sound of a boot on stone. One. Then another. A patrol.
The monster tenses. It looks at me, its eyes screaming a word. Run.
It pulls me to the centre of the room, to an iron grate set in the floor. It wrenches it free.
The stench that rises is the smell of things that have been unmade. The sound from below is the sound of a coming flood.
The monster points down into the dark. My mind presents the grim arithmetic. A quick death from the guards above, or a slow one in the sewer below.
I choose the slow one. I put my hand into the filth and begin to climb down.
You have chosen the path of the rat. Find the light, or
The smell down here is the smell of a thousand forgotten things rotting together. A black river of sludge and bone fragments sucks at my boots as I wade through.
A sound cuts through the filth. A drone, like a note held in a vast, empty church. A soft, pearlescent light spills from the pipes that line the tunnel, and from them comes the sound.
A memory surfaces, cold and sharp as a shard of glass. A dusty workshop. My master's voice, a scratch I thought I'd buried. 'The Anima Conduit. It carries the essence.'
Something moves in the sludge at my feet. A slug of oily darkness, its skin wet and smooth. The sight of it triggers another memory. A page in a book, a sketch of this very thing. 'A Dreg,' my master explained, a faint excitement in his dry voice. 'A god's discarded finger.'
The alchemist in me feels a spike of intellectual terror at the sight of it. But the creature in me feels a pull to this discarded, monstrous thing. The war between the two thoughts makes my stomach heave.
We move deeper into the tunnel. The monster stops, its hand shooting out to bar my path. It points. Ahead, a hairline crack in one of the great silver pipes weeps a soft, glowing mist.
It drifts towards us, and before the monster can pull me back, I breathe it in.
The scent hits me first. Salt and ozone burning the rot from my nostrils. Then the feeling. The ache in my hip is gone. My back finds a forgotten straightness. My hands close around the slick wood of a ship's helm, their grip sure and strong.
A wave, a mountain of black water, crashes over the deck, and a triumphant shout erupts from the men at my back. It is a cry of victory.
My victory.
I am their captain. I am their rock. I am the eye of their storm.
The feeling is certainty. A complete and total rightness.
Then a hand, a misshapen, gentle hand, closes on my arm and pulls me away.
The ship splinters into nothing. The shouts and cries of the crew becomes the gurgling of filth around my ankles. I am an old woman in the dark again.
The loss is a clean cut, a quick amputation of a better self.
The monster watches me. Its face is a mirror of the pain I feel. It has been here before.
My hand goes to my chest, to the hollow space where the captain's confidence used to be. My master called this 'the essence'. A neat, clean word. A clinical term for a resource. A fuel.
My lungs burn with a sudden, crushing knowledge. I didn't breathe in a fuel. I breathed in a person. A woman.
All her triumphs and fears, scraped out of her skull and served up as this filth.
This whole place runs on it.
A pure, human horror, Nora's horror, runs through me.
Butchery.
They throw away the conscience, the kindness. They keep only the greasy scum.
The thought is a blade in my gut. This butchery... am I any better?
A horrifying thought.
The parts they throw away, I keep.
The captain's certainty, her victory. The memory reminds me of something. A name for it surfaces, a piece of driftwood in a black sea. The Echo.
The word lands, and a terrible kinship clicks into place. The captain. This fuel. She's an Echo, too. Just one without a home to haunt.
My eyes drift from the filth on the floor to the glowing pipes that line the tunnel.
The cure can't tear down these walls. But it can give the ghosts back their names.
My hands tighten around the satchel. I need to get this somewhere safe.
The monster ignores my quiet horror. Already working, it pulls a thick, resinous gob from a pouch at its hip and scrambles up the slick pipework with the ease of a gecko.
It finds the leak and seals it. The glowing mist vanishes as if it were never there.
The ruin of its face seems to lift for a moment.
It leads me past a bend in the tunnel, to a small, hidden alcove. In it, a huddle of Dregs tremble, their black forms contracted against a cold draught.
The monster looks at them, and the frantic fear leaves its face. It is replaced by a paternal gentleness.
The monster pulls a tool from his pouch. A small, rusted pry bar. It moves to a valve.
It twists the tool. The valve gives with a groan of tortured metal.
My mind screams a warning. The memories. The captain.
But the monster breaks the seal.
A soft, pearlescent warmth spills into the alcove, bathing the creatures in its light.
The Dregs do not recoil. They do not react to the ghosts in the mist. They only seem to feel the heat. Their bodies uncurl. The trembling ceases. One of them, the smallest, makes a soft, happy sound, like a purring cat.
The monster turns to me, its expression soft, as if sharing a precious secret. It reaches down and strokes the small Dreg's head.
Its touch is so impossibly gentle on the creature's head. In that one, simple gesture, the monster I saw begins to fracture.
A single, shuddering breath leaves the monster. The first clean sound I have heard it make.
As it strokes the small Dreg in the soft, stolen light of the pipe, I see its face clearly for the first time. It is a monster's face. And it is the kindest one I have ever seen.
But there, in the wreckage, is one perfect thing. The arch of its right eyebrow.
It is not the eyebrow of a monster. It is shaped like a question mark, lifting at the end in a slight, curious tilt. It is a piece of punctuation from a sentence that has been erased, left behind after the words are gone.
It is the eyebrow of a boy who asked too many questions. A boy who looked at the world with a wry, intelligent curiosity. It is a ghost of the man he should have been, surviving in the wreck of who he is.
My heart, this old, stolen heart, aches with a sudden, fierce, grandmotherly pride.
I reach into the satchel and retrieve one of the books. I turn back to the page with the wretched drawing of the monster.
Then, with my old, steady hand, I take a piece of charcoal from the pouch. I look at the boy's eyebrow. I look at the drawing. And I begin to correct the sketch, glancing up at his face to get it right.
The boy meets my eyes. He seems to feel the shift in me, the warmth that has replaced the fear.
He straightens his broken body, a painful, shuddering effort. He squares his shoulders. He lifts his chin. He mirrors the proud, defiant posture of the captain he saw me become.
? Featured Web Novel
INCOMING TRANSMISSION:
Science FantasyCozy LitRPGCraftingSlice-of-LifeFound Family
Tess Rivera doesn't need a combat class to survive. She needs one that can fix a dying city.
On a dying world, nineteen-year-old Tess is a repair tech just trying to get by. When a glitch in an old dungeon system brands her with a strange {null} class, she gains the power to see the dungeon's code and talk to its lonely AI. The dungeon isn't cleared—it's just broken. And Tess is the only one who can fix it.
What to expect
- Cozy progression through repairs
- Quirky AI companion
- Slice-of-life repair jobs building to larger mysteries
- System-light LitRPG
- Skill Creation
Inspired By:
- Beware of Chicken
- The Wandering Inn
- Prophecy Approved Companion
- Arcane Ascension
Science FantasyDystopian with HopeWriteathonCharacter-driven
"Not everything can be fixed? We'll see about that."