Echo Canyon was not what I was expecting. A stream led down into the chasm, but the walls were narrow, with no real passage down into it except to climb. Or fall. What the hell kind of fae was this Bell person? I could almost straddle the canyon if I could do better splits.

  Creeping roots dangled over the edge from massive white oak trees nearby. All four of us stepped up to the drop and looked down into the trickling dark. Jake flicked his tail like a thoughtful cat and turned around, looking up into the trees.

  Elora had already started to scurry up one. I paused my confusion to watch her climb like a sugared-up capuchin monkey. Akilah eased down to sit, crossing her legs and adjusting her robes. She caught me watching her and waved a hand.

  “Do your thing. If you need help, you know where we are.”

  My shoulders slumped.

  Well, it was my task, and they were good enough to come along with me instead of bailing to go drinking. That would be what we were doing when this was over. Somewhere far from Heartland. Those sons of sprites would probably poison our wine.

  I stretched out onto my belly, hanging over the edge enough to look down. Far below, forty, maybe fifty feet, I could see the glimmer of water at the bottom.

  “Bell?” I called.

  A glance at the task on my HUD confirmed my task. Raise Bell’s spirit. The vagueness of this Kindness Trial was worse than the instructions that came with my Ikea desk. I probably had to do something disturbing to raise her spirit.

  “Bell!” I shouted down. “Be—oh.”

  Maybe it was literal. A strong possibility hit me—Bell was dead. The chasm was treacherously deep. A bumbling fae could have fallen in, snapped her neck, and her spirit was floating with her dead, bloated body. I smacked my forehead and rolled over onto my back. The sky above mocked me.

  “I think I have to go down there and retrieve a corpse,” I mumbled.

  No one was surprised except me. When I sat up, they all watched me from their respective reclines, all wearing the same ‘get on with it,’ glare. I punched at the sky, wishing it was the System’s face.

  “Yeah, I’m going. If I die, don’t leave me with Bell,” I sighed.

  I eyed the walls, the roots, and the distance across. Really wished I had some kind of armor to protect my skin. Thick skin helped, a perk of my racial choice, but that didn’t replace real leather.

  Turning, I dropped my legs into the gap. Grabbing a thick root, I eased in and started the descent. The craggy walls were lined with waterworn fractures that offered poor hand and foot holds. I had to slide, using gravity as my accelerator and the pressure of my back on one side and hands and knees against the other to slow my downward trajectory.

  I wormed my way down, jaw clenched the whole time. Climbing back up was something I didn't want to think about. It would suck. The goal was all that mattered, and I kept my mind on the reasons. I’d started this dumb quest chain, and I would damn well finish it.

  It was damp. The deeper I went, the wetter it got. Roots tapered away to nothing but slick moss and slime. I was hesitant to touch the slippery smears, but it didn’t sting. The way down was full of minor slips that nearly stopped my heart. My ears pounded like war drums.

  How did returning from death work, anyhow? Would my body despawn, or do you get five grave plots on Shade Hill? So many questions.

  I was just thinking about what I wanted on my gravestone when I hit a nasty patch of slime, and suddenly I was in freefall.

  A second later, I crashed into the water.

  The cold punched through me, but it was tolerable. For a moment, I was submerged, rolling in dark suspension without a sense of up or down.

  When I burst up to the surface, I gasped in a lungful of air and gagged. The smell down in Echo Canyon was ripe with death. Reminded me of the time I forgot steak in the back of my fridge, but wetter, older. Damn the concealing forest of my condiment collection.

  Every slap of water against rock echoed in the tall, narrow waterway. The current was slow, easy enough to tread water. I would have been in trouble if it had been a rushing torrent. I turned in a slow circle until I saw a lump of old branches mostly submerged.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Sitting upon it was the ghostly outline of an elf. The smell was coming from that direction. My nose twitched as I drifted over. Bell’s translucent form was perched on a branch over a corpse tangled in the detritus, legs pulled up, arms around them.

  Her head lifted as I approached, ephemeral hair plastered to her scalp. Bell’s nameplate floated above her, so I couldn’t mistake her for some other ghost down there. I swam up, looking over her body.

  “Skaama,” I muttered, spitting water away. All the water down here had touched her corpse, and it got in my mouth. Eww.

  “Help me,” Bell whispered. Her voice was displaced, as if it came from the corpse instead of the ghost. That was impossible, naturally. I squinted at the apparition and then back at the swollen body.

  “Do you have a task for me?” I asked, searching my inventory for my rope.

  “Please take me out of here,” she murmured.

  Where the hell was my—fuck. “Shitshitshit. JAKE!”

  Jake had my damn rope.

  I tilted my head back and bellowed up the canyon, “JAKE! ROPE!”

  “Help—help,” Bell glitched, her image wavering, resetting to her earlier position. Her head rose again, and she looked at me. “Help me.”

  “If this quest is glitched, I swear to all the gods everywhere…” I trailed off, because what could I do? I didn’t understand a lot of the coding inside the partition of the System that was mine. Could I even reach outside my partition?

  “What?” Jake hollered down. I could see his silhouette against the purple night, peeking over the edge.

  “I NEED ROPE! DROP IT HERE!” If it fell anywhere else, it would be lost to the stream. I’d be lucky if it drifted over to the pile of fallen branches at the furthest, deepest point of the cavern.

  I watched the snake of rope uncoil as it fell in my direction, treading water toward it, arms up and out to catch. The rough braid clipped the tip of my fingers. I snatched it before it slithered away into the depths with a gasp of rank air.

  Bell’s ghost flickered, her form glitching to occupy her resting position and the one she’d taken to speak with me, like a corrupted frame skipping back and forth. She was obviously an NPC, experiencing some kind of problem. I might have actually been the first one in a while to interact with this part of the chain. Too bad there were no mods to tell.

  I swam over to her body. Tatters of clothing clung to the limp, bloated figure. It was slick and cold to the touch, heavy despite her small frame. I looked up at the ghost and whispered, “I’ll get you out of here.”

  Working her limbs free of tangled branches, I hauled her further up onto the springy, matted mass of leaves and wood. Would she reset back down here after I brought her up? How much did an NPC care about where they were? As I struggled to fashion a harness, redoing the process a few times until I got it right, I had nothing but time to occupy my mind. And the horror of her existence as an NPC. The knots kept slipping; the harness was a goddamn mess.

  Bell was forever lost in an endless loop of failure. Of being trapped. Waiting for someone that never comes. When someone like me came? She ended up back here anyway. A fate worse than deletion.

  I blinked back the surprising burn of tears.

  Why should I feel bad for a program object? It probably knew nothing more than its programmed function and felt nothing. An NPC couldn’t suffer an existential crisis.

  Could it?

  “Fucking. Harness,” I snarled. I hated what I was doing, hated the task, Ashwynn, and the System.

  The hunger to set the whole System on fire consumed my mind. The rage made it harder to focus on my task, and it was a while before I had Bell’s corpse tied to my body, the harness designed to dangle below me when I started the climb.

  I swam over to where the walls were narrow enough to ascend in the same way I came down. Sheer muscle, pressure, and willpower. Bell and I would have become forever friends if I’d lacked one of those.

  It was dawn by the time I made it back up. Jake and Akilah were there to give me a hand, grabbing at the pinching harness that ground into my waist and thighs. They hauled me up the rest of the way. I fell to my side, lying by the edge of the crevasse, tugging at the knots around my waist.

  Bell’s ghost had drifted along with me, only glitching back down to the pile of debris once. When the body was pulled up and dropped beside me, the ghost stood at the edge of the narrow gorge, hands clasped.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and disappeared.

  I lay there, looking at the task note. Complete.

  There was no relief, no tingle of dopamine. Nothing. The thoughts that ran through my head while I did the job solidified. There was no one to take the NPC’s body. Soon she would despawn and return to her watery grave.

  It left me feeling cold, as if in some way, her existence in death had consumed a piece of me. I sat up next to the stinking corpse, watching the forest brighten with the blue star’s shine.

  “Dath?” Jake asked, crouching beside me, tone cautious. “You okay?”

  I glanced at him, then at Echo Canyon. My lips pressed hard against my tusks as I pursed my lips, narrowing my eyes. I clapped his shoulder and said, “Nope. Let’s go.”

  Thrusting myself into a stand, I undid the harness around Bell. It felt wrong to leave her there, like that. But that was the design.

  I raised a hand to the sky and folded down my fingers until only one remained up and shouted, “Fuck you, Archive!”

  Bell’s form started to despawn as we were walking away, the chilling weight of her existence lingering in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t let this quest, or any other, be my breaking point.

  “I’m gonna get our rewards and then punch Petal Dew across Heartland,” I mumbled under my breath.

  That wasn’t right, either. Petal was obviously another NPC, but real enough to me—part of this hellish cycle. Taylie, Ashwynn, Urstana, and Aran; they were real. Crazy fae, but real, abducted by Archive and players in the Virtual System. It wasn’t their fault, either.

  My bad mood was all on Archive.

  It was time to claim the thing I’d fought for with all my will. My reputation.

  -ARCHIVE-