Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Okay…what the shit? What’d I miss?

  I left to go and grab some food and when I come back I find this thread has exploded. Do I really need to read all 130+ replies or can someone give me the 2 minute version?

  FarFieldVanishes

  ZEKE!!! You weren’t lying about everything. That’s basically what we’ve been talking about.

  What happened is I was reading your fic and booted up Frontiers so I could retrace your steps through the House of Seasons. Loved your descriptions btw. It got me itching for more. So my character stumbled across a section in the Spring Wing that you described and found a book case that could be destroyed. After breaking the bookcase, I found that journal you talked about.

  I took screenshots of everything and showed pics of it to the forum…and things kinda got out of hand.

  MushroomCleric

  What FarField is trying to say is that the thread went nuclear. You’re semi-famous on DeepFracture now.

  Word got around that you unearthed actual lore in Frontiers. FarField is documenting everything and a bunch of the rest of us are doing our own walkthroughs. This thread has bled into a few other places in the forum. Both General Discussions and Lore are going crazy right now. We’re getting a bunch of people popping into the thread and they're reading everything you wrote and doing their own walkthroughs right now.

  DrindleSprinkles

  You left when everyone was complaining about you breaking canon. Now you’re back and I’m just sitting here in awe at the complete 180 from everyone.

  ClickWhirr

  Still think your take on the Blooming Witch is soft. But, if you turn out right about her then you earned yourself a follow for this fic.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Not a fanfic.

  Also, it’s nice to find that people aren’t biting my head off anymore. And if the thread gaining steam means that more people are gonna be reading this and helping me out with info and advice, then that sounds like a good deal.

  CrushDaddyXx

  Z3ke = the reluctant prophet.

  Dood logged out for a sandwich and came back to a movement. Mushroom and Story are his disciples. We are his congregation. This fic = ????????????

  StoryLeech

  Hey Zeke, what kind of advice or info are you looking for this time? You haven’t actually asked anything yet, and considering that you just dropped real lore about the House of Seasons, I figure the community owes you something.

  I’d be happy to help you brainstorm your next few chapters and patch everything with what we know about The MIZ.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I appreciate the offer but I’m not ready to ask for advice yet. There’s a ton more I haven’t told you all about, and I want to get through it before I start asking questions.

  The House of Seasons only covers about two days of my eight day journey. I’m gonna warn everyone up front that the next part isn’t all that flashy, but I’m still gonna write it out. Maybe there’s something useful in the small details I give and it’ll click for you all and you can give me a heads up on anything.

  Since there are a ton of new people in the thread, let me refresh your memory about what’s happening. I’m currently in The MIZ and I lack money, gear, and a class. I’m relying on the kindness of Patch and he’s letting me stay at the Roaring Drake. While I type up everything that’s happened over the past couple days, start thinking about what I should do from here. Talk it out amongst yourselves and get ready to contribute.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Alright, here we go. The last I posted I’d just finished up with the House of Seasons. The whole place melted down all around me and a door popped up out of nowhere which I stepped through. The next thing I knew, I was back in the Deadlands.

  I’d suddenly popped back up in the ruins that I’d been running towards before I found myself sucked into the House of the Seasons. During my brief time away from the Deadlands, everything had changed. The air had grown thinner and colder. The sun had set. And the presence, the same one that had been chasing me for the past few days, had completely disappeared.

  There wasn’t a pressure at my back or a phantom chasing me or anything that was driving me forward. For the first time since leaving Harbor Glen, I was somewhat safe and not being forced to run for my life.

  I stood there, fiddling with the knife I’d stuffed in my jacket pocket, waiting for the familiar dread of the presence to crawl its way back up my spine. But nothing happened. The only thing that I could think of that had pushed away the presence was that moment I’d entered the House. The Eaters must have given up on me at that point.

  Maybe they were too afraid of whatever had been in the House to chase after me. Maybe I’d slipped off their radar because they thought I was already dead. Whatever it was, I wasn’t convinced that they were gone for good so I waited. I listened. I watched. When I was finally sure that the presence wasn’t gonna come back and chase after me, I decided to get a better look around the ruins.

  They were strangely…beautiful. They were beautiful in a slightly haunted way. Crooked beams jutted up through the sand and I spotted some old stone steps that led up to nowhere. A couple walls were half-swallowed by ivy that I was sure shouldn’t have been able to survive out in the Deadlands.

  Have you guys ever seen those YouTube videos of people picking their way through abandoned locations and ghost towns? It kinda reminded me of that. Just a whole bunch of decay and dust and sand and no one else around.

  It didn’t take me long to realize what the ruins were. They were the House of Seasons. Or at least, it was whatever was left of the House. It had been destroyed. Burned down and rotted away. What had once been a grand manor with endless wings and impossible twisting logic had become a skeletal husk of its former self. The grand staircase had long since collapsed, the long winding halls were rubble, the roof had caved in, and it looked like scavengers had picked the place clean of anything usable.

  I poked around a bit, hoping I could find something to scavenge. In the middle of that I noticed a small blinking light in the corner of my vision. I instinctively started to swipe at it, but thankfully caught myself at the last moment.

  Quick refresher for anyone new to this thread: back when I’d first been dumped into this world I ended up on the Veilstrider. While walking around, an icon popped up in my vision. A “Class Unlocked” screen. Like an absolute idiot, I swiped it away without giving it half a thought and half the people on this forum tore into me, complaining that I’d given up my shot at a rare and possibly powerful class. Because of my mistake, now I'm unanchored and supposedly will start fading out of reality within a few weeks.

  If it sounds like I’m taking my sudden disappearance in a few weeks really well…I’m not. It’s more like I just refused to think about it.

  Anyways…I wasn’t so hasty this time that I saw some blinking notification. Instead, I sat on a nearby chunk of wood and focused my attention on the icons. There were two of them. The first was a bulleted list at the bottom right hand corner of my vision and looked sort of similar to what you’d see in the format bar of a word document. The second icon was a stylized backpack.

  When I focused on the bulleted list icon, a translucent panel slid up from the bottom of my vision.

  SKILLS

  Puzzle Intuition - Rank 1

  You’ve begun to see the threads of life. Increased awareness of non-linear patterns.

  A skill. Tons of thoughts raced through my mind when I spotted that I got a skill. The first was: there’s no way I’m so shit at puzzles. I should be at least a rank 5. My second thought was: this is a video game world, but it’s not like any game I’d ever played before.

  I remembered something that you all mentioned in an earlier post when you explained there weren’t any levels in the Fracture-verse games. No XP or grinding goblins until you hit max stats. Instead, everything was based around skills. Experience didn’t come from killing monsters and leveling up, it came from actual experience.

  So, I’d just unlocked my first skill and it was dealing with puzzles. Kinda anti-climactic if I’m being honest. I was hoping for something better.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  I was able to close the skill tab by looking away and focusing on the other icon. The backpack. My interface changed and a gray grid spread out in front of me, filled with neatly organized boxes each with a glowing edge. The entire grid was empty and at the top of the thing was a dropdown menu labeled [Dimensional Storage] with a “sort by” option underneath.

  I didn’t really want to start fiddling around with it because I didn’t know what would happen. Finally, I pulled my knife from my jacket and just held it in my hand while focusing on the storage grid. The second I thought about placing the knife into the grid, it vanished from my hand and reappeared in the top-left slot.

  Grinning to myself, I emptied my burlap sack. Bowl, flashlight, canned food, socks and a pair of pants that didn’t fit me, a quill I’d picked up somewhere, and a doll with button eyes and a black thread stitched where its mouth should be all disappeared into the storage. Each one settled into its own square on the grid, labeled automatically with short descriptions: [Bone Knife], [Offering Doll], [Can of Food], etc.

  There wasn’t any weight or encumbrance or anything like that when I stashed them into the storage. It was just clean organization in what I was guessing was my own pocket of space separated from my physical body. It was like a slice of reality had been carved out just for me to keep what mattered safe.

  With everything tossed into my storage, I took one last look around the ruins for anything that could be useful to me, and then set off. I didn’t have any idea about what I’d find deeper in the Deadlands, I just wanted to head somewhere. Away from the House and away from Harbor Glen and away from everything that had tried to kill me sounded like a good direction.

  Most of the next couple days aren’t really worth writing about. I didn’t get ambushed by any creatures or scavengers or anything living out in the Deadlands. I didn’t discover some hidden temple secreted away underneath a tree root. Instead, I walked and ate and slept and walked some more. The Deadlands stretched out around me, filled with rocks and underbrush and abandoned structures. Nothing chased me and nothing hunted me.

  I stumbled across an abandoned shack the first full day out of the House. It was leaning sideways on stilts and half of its roof had caved in, but it was shelter. I cleared out the debris by the entrance and crafted a small fire in one corner of the shack before cracking open a can of food. It was something pretending to be tuna and I devoured it.

  I slept on a pile of rags in the shack, my back propped up against the wall and my knife within arms reach. Nothing came after me in the night, and the next day I stumbled across the train tracks. They cut across the terrain in a straight line and I figured that, if I followed them long enough I’d find a station or a town or some sort of civilization.

  So I walked. And walked. And walked. I kept the tracks on my left and put one foot in front of the other until eventually I spotted something in the distance. I was a smear of gray on the horizon with thin fingers of smoke rising up into the sky.

  At first I told myself it was just a train idling at a stop. Maybe a maintenance crew was doing some work on it or refilling the coal or water or something. I picked up my pace, hoping to get to it before it took off again. But the closer I got to it, the more the idea that it was just an idling train started to unravel. The smoke rising from it wasn’t coming from the engine compartment. Instead, it was billowing from the entire train.

  It took me a few more hours of walking before I finally reached the train. By that point my legs were aching and every step burned. My feet were raw and blistered from where my shoes had rubbed too hard. My back was slick with sweat and my shirt clung to me. I’d long since stored my jacket away.

  When I finally got to the train, pain slipped into the background and my hunger dulled and my fatigue was shoved aside. I grew alert and cautious. The smoke wasn’t as thick as it had been when I’d first spotted the train. It was now just a few thin curls that dragged themselves up into the sky. I climbed the incline leading up to the tracks and was able to get a good view of the damage done to the train up close.

  The front of the train had jumped the rails. Not by much. Just enough that it gouged a deep scar into the earth where the engine had been yanked sideways. I looked around and noticed the tell-tale signs of a trap.

  Metal shards littered the ground around the front of the train. Some of them were hooked and rust-colored and jagged, almost like they’d been made out of old farming tools or blacksmith scrap and had been twisted into different shapes. Looking at the wreckage of the train, I figured that the train had to have been grabbed and hooked. Maybe the pieces of metal around the train had been attached to something heavy, and they were meant to hook onto the engine and slow it down. Whatever it was, the train had come to a stop so fast that it had snapped a coupling and tilted the entire train at an angle.

  The train had tried plowing through the trap, that much was obvious from all the churned dirt around the front of the engine. It hadn’t made it very far before it was forced to come to a stop.

  Looking at the sight of the train, I knew that this wasn’t caused by the Eaters. They didn’t lay traps. They didn’t need to. The last time they attacked the train they just blew out the windows and boarded the train and tore souls out of bodies.

  What had happened to the train wasn’t an Eater attack. It was too messy. Violent. Angry. All in a way that felt…human.

  I slowly made my way down the tracks, trying not to make any loud noises and scanning everything. The first few bodies were splayed out along the tracks near the second car. I think it’s called a tender?

  One of the bodies was lying face down, another was half-slumped against the train, blood had dried black down the front of her coat. Neither of the victims had been hollowed out, which was how I knew the Eaters hadn’t killed these two. No. These two victims had been stabbed or shot and left where they fell, not sucked dry by a monster.

  I climbed up into the nearest train car. The door was bent on its hinge and it was hanging awkwardly as I pushed through. The second I made my way inside, the smell hit me. It smelled of blood and smoke and burnt metal and the sour bite of decay.

  The inside of the car was dim, lit only by light coming in from the broken windows. Flies drifted lazily in the air. Bodies slumped in seats or were sprawled across the aisle. Blood soaked into the upholstery or pooled on the floor in wide, dark patches.

  One of the bodies was a woman who still had her hand wrapped tight around a bag strap, almost like she’d tried to grab her luggage and run. There was a man near the back of the car and his skull was split open. Most of the passengers had died where they stood.

  A few fought back. You could tell there was a fight here. I spotted defensive wounds on some of the bodies - hands shredded, arms raised. One of the guys had a knife in his grip, stained with blood. It hadn’t saved him.

  I slowly moved through the cars, holding my knife out in front of me. I was hoping to find someone who was still alive, but seeing all the bodies and all the carnage I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I picked my way forward, car after car, and scavenged as I went. It felt wrong to loot these bodies but I’d been walking through the Deadlands for days now and I needed supplies if I was going to survive.

  There was a med-kit tucked near a coupling hatch. I found some torn luggage that had been rifled through and tossed aside. The dining car was filled with unbroken glasses and I swiped some of them. All told, there wasn’t much in the train. Most of it had already been picked clean by whoever had attacked it. I looted the rest to the bones.

  It wasn’t until I got to the third car that I found him. Asshole. The douche who’d decoupled the train cars and left the woman behind for the Eater. I recognized his armor first. Or what was left of it. It had been torn open and slashed apart. His body was slumped near the rear door of the train and blood was everywhere. Deep puncture wounds dotted his arms and chest. His eyes were open.

  He’d gone down swinging, that much could be said about him. I crouched down and started rifling through his pockets. They’d already been turned out and his coat had been taken. Hell, even his boots were missing.

  I stood up and sighed, hoping that he’d have had something useful. That’s when I noticed the walls. They were covered in symbols that had been scratched and painted and seared into the metal. Those symbols hadn’t been there when I was last on the train. They coiled along the walls in jagged loops. Taking a better look, I noticed that they weren’t uniformly made. Some of them had been drawn with charcoal, some were scrawled in what I suspected was blood. A few of the symbols looked like letters while others were just…wrong. Wrong shapes that made your head itch if you stared too long.

  I touched one of the symbols and found that it was still wet and tacky. Fresh. Whoever had attacked the train hadn’t been gone for long.

  Eventually I ended up in the tender car. That’s the car that sits behind the engine and feeds it coal and water. There was a pile of coal in the car that stretched nearly to the ceiling, and next to it was a water bladder wrapped around the coal pile like a thick steel belly.

  The water bladder wasn’t meant to be opened the way that I did. I jammed my knife into the seams and cracked it wide enough that warm, slightly stale water spilled down the side of the tank. I cupped my hands and drank from it like an animal.

  My throat felt like it had been rubbed with sandpaper and the sun had been baking my skin for days and my lips were cracked and bleeding. I hadn’t had much water since leaving the House of Seasons. So even while the water in the bladder was warm and slightly tangy, I drank my fill and then drank some more. Once I was finished, with my belly full, I sat down with my back against the coal pile and closed my eyes for just a second.

  That’s when I heard them. Voices. Muffled but close. Two men. They were walking outside the engine and heading to the back of the train.

  “...said there might still be something worth picking through,” one of the voices said. He sounded rough and tired and annoyed.

  “Yea? You know Jake doesn’t leave scraps,” the other answered. “You know that. Don’t know why you got us out here.”

  I dropped lower behind the coal pile, trying to make myself small and invisible. The coal dusted my face and arms and the front of my shirt. Every breath I took tasted like soot.

  Outside, I heard boots crunching slowly and lazily across the gravel around the train tracks, getting closer.

  Scavengers. Same as me, technically. But also not like me. These scavengers sounded practiced and I knew that they worked for whoever had ambushed this train in the first place.

  I tried to hunch smaller behind the mound of coal, my hand gripping tightly to my knife. The blade was dull and barely longer than my hand, but it was my only means of defense and I gripped it until my knuckles ached.

  If the scavengers came into the tender car, I was dead. I’d never fought anyone before. Not really. Sure, I’d been in a few fights as a kid but that was just childish bullshit. These were two men with weapons and experience.

  I listened as they moved through the train slowly, knocking things over and cursing when they couldn’t find anything useful.

  “Place is picked clean,” one of them complained.

  They sounded frustrated. Bored. I stayed crouched in the dark of the tender car, too afraid to shift my weight or breathe too loudly for fear that they’d find me. Time went strange. I might have stayed like that for five minutes or five hours. It didn’t matter. I was going to stay there until they left.

  Then came the sound that I was dreading: footsteps. One of them was headed towards me, getting closer and closer. He climbed up into the tender car with a grunt and I heard his boots scraping against the floor.

  Closer.

  Closer.

  I moved.

  He was seconds away from spotting me. My hands were shaking and my adrenaline was spiking and I didn’t know what to do. This guy was going to kill me. I was pretty sure he was working with whoever had attacked the train and killed all the passengers, and if he spotted me there he’d kill me too. My brain was frozen, both panicking and trying to figure out the best way for me to survive. The only idea I could come up with was to attack first and try to get the first hit in.

  I waited until the footsteps got closer and then I lunged from my hiding space. I barreled into the man and drove my knife straight into his chest, all the panic and adrenaline and fear in my body giving me strength.

  The knife didn’t slide in clean, and it didn’t feel like I expected it to. There was a pressure and a sickening resistance, like I was stabbing a tire that was filled with wet rags.

  The man didn’t scream or yell or shout out any dramatic last words. He also didn’t call out for his buddy either. The only sound he made was a soft grunt, a sort of “huhh” as the air was pushed out of his lungs. I locked eyes with him and saw the surprise in his face as I fell on him.

  We fell to the ground and I yanked the blood out and blood followed. Hot. Slick. Sticky. It ran down my hand and onto my sleeve. My stomach lurched but I couldn’t peel my eyes away from my knife and what I’d just done.

  I wanted to scream. Or puke. Or cry. Or beg forgiveness. I wanted to do all those things at the same time. But I didn’t. Instead, a small voice whispered in the back of my head. There’s another one.

  I took off running, keeping low. My knife was sticky in my grip and my breath was coming out in short bursts. I tried not to make too much noise. Something in my brain was warning me to be quiet. The only way I’d be able to survive what came next was to be as stealthy as possible and make sure the other scavenger didn’t see me coming.

  I rushed through the dining car and past the wrecked lounge until I finally spotted the second scavenger in the next passenger car, kneeling beside a body, rifling through pockets. He hadn’t heard me. At least, I don’t think he did. And if he did he probably thought it was his buddy coming back to him.

  When I reached the scavenger I tackled him to the floor and drove the knife into his back. He called out in surprise and tried to shrug me off, but I stabbed again. And again. And again. Into his ribs. Into his shoulders.

  The knife fought me every inch. It didn’t want to listen to me as I stabbed away. My hands were sticky and shaking and I almost dropped the blade, but I kept going.

  Eventually the guy stopped moving and I stopped stabbing and just knelt there, straddling his body with my arms streaked red. My breath rasped in my chest and my heart tried to pound its way out of my body and bile was pushing its way up my throat.

  I’d just killed.

  I’d just killed two people.

  Nowhere in that did it make me feel like a hero. I didn’t feel like a badass. I didn’t feel anything except for the panic and the fear and the adrenaline and the bile. And the cold. And the waiting. Waiting for the shock to wear off. Waiting for the guilt to start. And waiting for my brain to catch up to what my body had just done.