"Really Roche?" Cara said with a quirk of her brow, "You took the Big Sixty out? That's a lot of gun for a little man."

  My jaw...

  It dropped.

  "I-" I stammered as I stood in the doorway, my arms wrapped around the massive weapon, "What?"

  Cara snorted.

  "That is a big gun Mister Roche, Temjun could probably-" Vin started. Apparently the chance to mock me had blunted some of the horror at what he'd witnessed.

  "No!" I snapped, "ain't no one takin' this gun from my tentacles," I gave the rifle a squeeze, "it's mine, my own."

  "Gods above," Margarete hissed, placing a weather hand over her increasingly shadowed eyes, "it's hard to remember you're a monster when you walk out of the armory cradling a rifle taller than you are."

  Temjun just laughed.

  "He is short," observed the giant with amiable glee.

  I got a little hot under the collar at that. Wasn't often that I got reminded I took more after daddy than mom. Stupid squat Southern blood. I should've been at least as tall as Temjun, instead of barely reachin' the man's shoulder.

  "Does this mean we're not mad at him anymore?" Vin said, cutting cleanly through the lingerin' tension in the room, "because honestly, I don't think what he did was wrong." Admitted the boy.

  "Of course you don't," said Cara, "he ate a man's life-force, that's-"

  "Not really murder, is it?" Vin asked, "and it's certainly better than what happened to most of us. Right, Temjun?"

  Temjun grunted and nodded, his own eyes still a bit distant, "We take oil from Leviathans, isn't it just like that? Only," he turned to me, small eyes starin' hard, all humor gone, "I didn't like that you were sneaky, Mister Roche. You shouldn't do that. Just tell me and Mama, tell Cara and Vin and the girls. We're together, right?"

  Oof.

  Guilt. Hot and sticky, oozed down my back.

  "Yeah," I said softly, and then louder, "yeah, I should've told ya'll what I was goin' to do."

  "Oh fuck it," Cara snapped, "I don't care, okay?" she said lookin' to the room, "I'm sorry Captain, but you're the only one here who really thinks Roche is wrong. He's fucking terrifying, sure," she said her cheeks flushing as her eyes darted to the pale, husk of a man still layin' the back, "and maybe, kind of a monster," she said, and I could tell her words were sincere, "but he isn't evil. He's trying to keep us alive."

  Margarette sighed, a little more of her dwindlin' life leavin' in that breath, "That's all that matters now," she muttered, "we've come to that point in a tragedy where there is no morality, just survival." She looked to Cordileone, "I hate that. I hate you, just a little for making me see it, over and over again." She said to, maybe me, maybe Cara, maybe just this world. A world she was tired of, so clearly tired.

  A hundred and thirty years was a long time to live. So many opportunities to bend, break, and plain hurt.

  "Well," I cleared my throat, and held up the massive rifle, "I've got my gear, I'm healthy, and I'm going out. I'll scout outside on the way to the Sussr station. Get a lay of the land and the revenants. We need to move for the docks after that. Once we get you there, me and Temjun will break for the plant and we'll all get the fuck out of here."

  "Sounds good, just uh," Cara said, some levity persistin' behind the hurt that still dwelt in her eyes, "don't put your eye out with that thing, kiddo."

  Oh hell. You girl, you were on the list now. I could take one short joke, even two, but comparin' me to the little boy from that play?

  That was goin' too far.

  I shot her a look, but she was already gone, into the armory to sort through the dozens of cases and crates I'd cracked, to busy preparin' for war to spare any more time for me. She was a good woman, and I knew that. I'd make sure she got to live better than she had.

  All of us, in our own ways, deserved that at least.

  I left the armory through the front door, the wards zapping back into action after briefly allowin' me through.

  The Murkwater that I saw, finally free of that smotherin' mornin' fog, it was...

  Devastation.

  In the light of day the ruin was no longer abstract, not a distant thought but an experience that breathed and bled all around.

  Mud and blood stained streets, the overpowerin' stench of rot, past sickly sweet and now into that stage where it's almost gone, just so damn rancid your nose plain rejects the sensation.

  Claw marks and evidence of open violence scarred the false front frames of small shops and the homes between them. The collapsed remains of hard stand tents and canvas tenements lay strewn about, shredded and scattered by rushing bodies and the howling sea wind. Even the small proofs of people, a single shattered porcelain doll, a half eaten meat pie turned so bad even the flies didn't want, a gore soaked hammer left to rust in the mud, even they remained, silent and forlorn.

  But the worst part, what made me shiver, was the silence.

  Here I saw a place where people had lived, loved, fought, drank, and eventually died.

  Yet there was even an echo to prove it was anything more than an elaborate set, just plaster and pageantry stood to mimic Imperial life. A ghost town, in the most literal sense of the phrase. Only, just now, even the ghosts were gone.

  I knew the revenants here, contrary to popular lore, didn't mind the sunlight much. They had swarmed on me in the full light of the sun when I first passed the gates...

  So why, where were they now?

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  A question for a man with more time and sense than I'd ever had.

  Don't the gift drake in the mouth, just get on and ride.

  I moved, a fast jog through the empty streets. The magic in my boots silencing every foot fall as I enjoyed the simple sensation of painless motion for the first time in nearly three days. The Big Sixty was heavy, but not uncomfortable. It bounced a little in my tentacles, its momentum suspended and absorbed easily as I ran.

  I kept it high, but not shouldered. Might be a little more modern, a little more compact than the original Longshadows, the common Northman nickname for the weapon, but it was still a massive fucking rifle. Wouldn't do to go bangin' my shiny new melon popper into the sides of buildings, knockin' shit over like a bronto in a elven tea house. I had to keep quiet, lest I satisfy my earlier curiosity and find out where the fuck all the revenants had gone to.

  The Sussr Station was a tower, a tall wooden frame of black oak beams and dark red brick work makin' up the rest. To say it stuck out like a sore thumb from the short, squat Imperial architecture of Murkwater would be an understatement. It was one of the tallest structures in the whole city, and I was plumb baffled how I'd missed it.

  Though uh, bein' chased by an unending tide of hungry death did tend to narrow one's focus.

  I approached it with a little more caution still. Rather than bust down the front door I took a walk around the tower, noting the lack of windows and the single, heavy steel door. That'd mean no sun in there, no light. Good place for revenants to roost, if the wards didn't keep them out.

  Speakin' of which, even from the outside I could see the wicked magic glowin' in the metal. Powerful, dangerous wards, not bound to the walls, or the earth. No, these were locked into the space between, carved into one layer or another, only truly visible to my Arcane Soul. I couldn't even be certain what their purpose truly was.

  Keep things out, said my head, keep somethin' in, muttered my gut.

  But I guess ain't either of them had the right of it all. Whoever this Ascended mage, this maker of plagues, defiler of life, he was playin' games far and away above my crude level. Bet someone like Shorty or Professor Clarke would shit a chicken to get a load of this.

  Hoped both of them never would though. Murkwater needed to die, be excised like the festering tumor it was.

  I checked the breech of my rifle, spyin' the blood red cartridge, then thought better of it. I might need the heavy fire power, especially if Cara's mobile corpse pile or the alleged experiments of the mage were about, but for now, for tight quarters, the Bix Sixty just wasn't my gun.

  "Sorry girl," I whispered to the noble weapon, and then I set it gently against the tower. I'd be back, and I'd be back soon. Until then though, my pistols would have to do.

  With that I drew my pair of Turtle Guns, their short barrels and wide muzzles ideal for tight corners and blind fire. I might have a bit less firepower on hand, but with two shots in each gun and a whole bandoleer of shells, I was ready and loaded for dragon.

  I let four tentacles keep the guns leveled while two more began to touch and probe the empty air between me and the station's door. I didn't know how they were doing it, but I could vaguely feel the way they tested the and probed the ethereal space. Meanwhile my eye strained to take in the wriggling, serpentine shape of the-

  Wait...

  I knew this magic. Knew exactly this kind of wicked work. I had seen just it's like down in another dark place. Seen it inscribed on an altar dedicated to the husk of an evil that out to have been banished from this world aeons ago.

  They were Anasisi runes, and I nearly slapped myself in the face for missin' it all. The dark goo, the same shit that leaked out of the crock that took Shorty's arm, and eventually subverted her mind and body. The same wicked sorceries of the ancient, allegedly dead enemy of the Ascended and Outcast both.

  It was all fuckin' connected.

  My nightmares, they were just separate acts in the same damned play.

  I swallowed as the realization settled in.

  Murkwater didn't just need to burn. That wouldn't be enough. Just like the Vault, it needed to be buried too. Every trace of those horrors adn any that'd adopt their ways, needed to be cleansed from this world.

  I felt the heat of the void grow, a warmth in the nothing that dwelt inside me, and a strange comfort fell on my shoulders.

  Yep. That was touchin' on something my Patron's Patron actually wanted. Something that would sit so fine in her own empty nothing. A morsel of ruin denied to her fathomless appetite.

  The Anasisi, and all they had wrought, belong with her in that terrible, endless sea.

  Well.

  Won't hear me argue.

  Slowly, like molasses runnin' out the jar on a cold, sorry mornin' the runes failed under my instinctive work. My tentacles didn't just probe, they tore and cut. The flesh of the world was rent asunder, and those runes, so alien, so deadly, they bled out, and before I could really register what I was doing, into my arms.

  I felt a flicker of panic as I realized I had sat at a table and bought in on a hand I couldn't even see. Whatever was goin' on, it wasn't just Deep's Embrace workin' through me. No, the Lady of the Void, she was there too, in some distant, unknowable capacity. I felt the unseen darkness draw up my arms, the sensation cold, crushing and wrong, but...

  Right.

  It vanished as whatever it was, ran slowly down into the ocean of nothing I was packin' in my belly.

  I did not like that. Not one damn bit. I spared myself a full bodied shiver, then chased that evil with a dose of newfound fear, throwing it all into the emptiness. I didn't know what the fuck was goin' on, but I knew that it was a problem for future Roche, not present Roche. Present Roche had demons to kill and good folk to save, so it was time to-

  I halted midstep. Struck by the strangest sensation yet. As if the uncanniness of dead town, the horror of stripping vitality from a living man, and whatever I had did with the rune just now wasn't bad enough, the gnawing sensation of somethin' wrong grew in me.

  Somethin' I forgot...

  The wind whipped up, whistling through the empty streets of Murkwater, trash and dust stirred up, carried off into the mornin' light.

  Check your book, came the thought. It was in my voice, the one that echoed in my empty head, but I was, well, fairly certain, that I did not think it.

  No siree. I didn't not like Murkwater, not like any of this.

  A tentacle reached into my coat pocket and slid the little book out, and another assisted it, flipping past the record of my Path to a section I had intentionally ignored since the Vault.

  Seemed today was one for ugly recollection. I frowned, deeper and deeper as I read the 'requests' section in my little black book.

  Task Available

  Customer: The Boss Lady

  Description: Reclaim what has been taken from her realm.

  Reward: Listen, just do it. She'll give you somethin', and right now? You're on a shortlist of beings she doesn't want to eat. Yet.

  Stay on that list

  Oh. Lovely. Wasn't enough to hover over my damn peerin' at me like some voyeuristic ghost, she had to start makin' demands of me? What happened to nothin' for nothing'? Now it was-

  More words bled onto the page of my rune book, a post script from my Patron, the writing hasty, and scrawled, as if the monster who helped me make use of my mana was writing under duress.

  P.S.

  Don't look it in the eyes.

  Well, fuck me with a bottle of good whiskey, orders from the nameless evil and vague warnings from a monster older than the damn oceans? This day, it just got better and better. If I hadn't have found the Big Sixty, I think I'd just quit right here and now. Just stroll on out the gates, leave whatever still lived in Murkwater to die.

  Of course I wouldn't, but if all else did fail I wasn't above cutting losses. I could get Margarette, Temjun and the rest to the gate and through the marshes if saving those still trapped in the Processing Plant proved too much. More and more I was thinkin' the plant might just be a trap, a way for the mad mayor and his mage to lure us in and finish the job.

  Oh well, what was more lump of sinister magical shit on the pile anyway?

  I kicked open the door to the Sussr Station, my guns at the ready, and marched into the dark.

  One look, one shadowed glance into the horror beyond the door and I knew, I just fuckin' knew.

  I was going to regret this.