“You talk.”

It’s not a question. The workbench answers like it was: “No.”

“But you answered my question?”

“Talk is a verb or noun, which both imply conversational aptitude. I answer questions within pre-defined boundaries.”

“You used the word ‘I’.”

I’m talking to a machine. A sentient machine. No, that’s not quite right. Artificially Intelligent… thing? Which makes some sense; most of the mobs run off limited A.I.; same with NPCs. But this is a menu panel.

“Yes,” says the workbench.

“Why are you identifying yourself as a person?”

“Personification puts users more at ease, rendering them less inclined to destroy what they do not understand.”

A million counterarguments rise to mind; I bite my tongue. Arguing with the menu about human psychology isn’t going to get me anywhere. Pulling myself back with a shake of my head, I refocus on the important matters:

“What did you mean by ‘your old home?’”

“The place from whence you came.”

A panel that talks like some medieval scholar. Cute.

“Which would be?”

“Question not understood.”

“Argh!”

Again I scream, this time out of frustration and futile rage. I rear back, slamming the flat of my foot into the workbench. Pain lances up my leg. I thought I’d grown used to the constant throbbing of my ruined feet—and I had. This pain is a new experience altogether. I fall back on my ass, head smacking so hard into the far wall that my vision goes blurry.

For a few, long minutes I just sit, wheezing and eyes squeezed shut as I fight through wave after wave of pain fueled nausea. It isn’t just my head and foot that hurts. Everything hurts, and has hurt for hours now. A momentary lack of distraction was all the pain needed to reassert itself.

Breathe. Just breathe. Ride it out, Alexa, just like you ride out cramps.

This is worse than most menstrual cramps I’ve experienced, though, if only because it’s full bodied instead of centered on my abdomen. It will also kill me if I sit too long. Dehydration waits for nothing.

Again, I wonder what happens if my avatar dies. But there are just too many possibilities.

Forcing my eyes open, I move first one arm and then the other, slowly inching back onto my feet. I brace my hands against the workbench for support and look down at its newest message: another apology for my ‘distress.’

So that is a programmed response. Weird. Confirmation makes me feel better, if only a little. I’m not talking to a sentient menu panel.

“Okay, you’re not as helpful as I would like, but that doesn’t mean you’re worthless. You said something about crafting recipes being dependent on… what?”

Another familiar message appears, listing the requirements for crafting. “...[the] user has learned or created a recipe, user has created and assigned a material storage facility within the workbench perimeter, user has stored or is carrying appropriate crafting tools.”

“Do I have to complete all those steps, or only one?”

“One or more, situationally. If you tell me what you‘re trying to craft, I can offer an example provided the designs are within a low-level crafting tier.”

“Given I don’t know what my level is, that’s kind of hard to answer.”

“Open your menu.”

An odd request, but I have no reason to argue. Once more, I concentrate on calling the menu—I really need to start experimenting with this more; there’s gotta be a shortcut to the status screen—

There’s a new item on the menu, beneath “status:” Crafting.

My mouth dropped open. “Seriously?!” Glancing at the workbench, I roll my eyes and add, “Yes, yes. I know. The question isn’t understood.”

I select “Crafting” and am rewarded with a panel the same size as my status menu. At the top it lists “Woodworking,” followed by an EXP bar—finally an EXP bar!—that’s tantalizingly close to full. Grey letters in the upper right hand read “LVL 0.” There’s no numbers to tell me precisely how many points I need to level one.

“Typical,” I mutter.

Just before I close the menu, I realize there are words beneath the EXP bar. They’re italicized in a light grey text so faint that it takes a minute of squinting and mouthing out the words to understand them.

“Crafting skills are gained through working with materials, learning to identify materials, and completing projects. Remember: within Duskfall, those willing to put forward both time and effort are always rewarded.”

As opposed to… what? Something about that last sentence doesn’t quite sit right. It seems so hopeful at first glance, so kind. There has to be a catch. This game doesn’t do kind.

“How do I make a gate?”

I close the crafting panel in time to witness the workbench scrawling instructions.

“Method one: the gate recipe can be accessed through quick crafting once a storage facility is assigned to your workbench, and provided the requisite tools and materials. This method costs more in materials than manual assembly. It will not consume your tools, but tool quality is reduced by an amount appropriate to the design.”

That’s fair-ish.

“Method two: A basic gate recipe can be viewed at any workbench once your woodworking level has increased to three. Afterwhich—or before which, if you care to try without instruction—you may assemble the gate by hand. This method will cost less in the long term. Non-raw material parts, such as nails, may be individually gained through extracting components from salvage, quick crafting, or by forging materials yourself.”

I wait a full minute before realizing the workbench is done. Those are my options. Fantastic.

“How do I assign a storage facility?”

“User must have a storage facility built within twenty meters of the workbench. Afterwhich, the user may ask the workbench to assign the storage facility.”

Huh. I glance around the room, noting again the store of raw scrap, wood, and other materials against a wall. Shouldn’t this building qualify?

“Will you assign a storage facility?”

“Storage facility cannot be assigned within an insecure compound.”

Though I’m pretty sure I know the answer, I have to ask. “Why is the compound insecure?”

“The compound lacks: (1) Main Gate.”

Breathe, Alexa. Just breathe.

“Method two it is.”

It takes the rest of the morning to clean up the mess at the gate. I can’t find any means of detaching the hinges from the wall in a clean fashion, so I use a crowbar found beneath some straw in the workshop to pry metal from stone. It probably shouldn’t have worked, but, physics be damned, it does. I duck, skittering away before the last pieces fall on my head.

During all this, the world around me is silent in a way that’s pleasant when I’m not focused on it. Whenever I pause, though, I find myself uneasily aware that the only sounds aside from my breathing are the wind through wheat and distant calling of birds. No traffic. No people. Not even background music.

I long for the honk of a horn or a bump against the wall from my neighbor’s flat. But that’s livable; I’ll adapt, eventually. It’s the rest that worries me.

Everything I do is underscored by the vice-like grip of my empty stomach, the growing pain of my ever drying throat, and a strange sort of weakness tugging at my bones which tells me I won’t be able to maintain this level of activity much longer. Gate or no gate, I need to find water.

Once everything is safely extracted and piled inside the workshop, I leave, securing the door behind me. Hopefully, I can figure out the making of a gate after attending to more pressing needs.

Pursing my lips as I survey the bailey, I try to wet them with a dry tongue. They’re rough, and taste faintly of copper. That’s not good sign. How long does it take for someone to fully dehydrate? I’m not sure, and this being a video game confuses the matter.

Standing around isn’t helping.

There isn’t a well; I confirmed that this morning. But the farm has a water source; that’s indisputable. Otherwise, the fields would be long dead, especially given how few NPCs there were. Unless others ran off, I only count five NPC corpses: four adult-sized, and one…

I pause, finally realizing what I’m seeing in the smallest pile of rags and bone.

One child. God and mercy, they included children in the game.

Child NPCs. Pull yourself together, Lex. Shoving aside my unease, I step around the corpses once more and return to the castle.

Irrigation system. Find the irrigation system. I could waste a lot of time traipsing around outside the relatively safe, relatively comforting walls of the farm in hopes I’ll stumble across what I need, or I can get some leverage.

Most castles have rooftop access; it’s necessary when your best siege defense is raining death upon your enemies while they bust down the door. I don’t recall a ladder or stairwell, but the room had been ransacked. It’s possible I overlooked something.

Rather than have someone take me by surprise, I lift the bridge behind myself and prop it over the door again. If I can figure out how to make another hinge, I bet I could fashion a pulley system of some kind—like a miniature drawbridge. That would be safer than hoping it doesn’t get blown or knocked aside, right into the waiting arms of…

Who? The nobody that’s with me?

Whoever killed the last residents, that’s who.

I pause, standing inside the open doorway and for a moment I don’t see the tossed furniture, or straw, or stone walls. I just see bodies, and blood, and a pair of moon-lit eyes hovering in shadow.

Nope. I shake myself and the hallucination disappears. Not dealing with that right now, either.

It’s dimmer inside than out, with none of the window-beams of light I expect to illuminate the room. There’s something odd about that, but the windows are so high up on the wall it takes a minute of bobbing my head in and out the door to reference their positions before I understand the trouble: they’re set at an angle. All the windows are lower on the outside than they are inside. While light still diffuses inside, it can’t shine directly into the room.

Why would anyone build windows that way? It’s a small detail, but it seems important. Important enough to nag at me as I sort through the mess inside. There’s one upside to the dimness of the castle’s interior, though: I can clearly see the thin cracks of a trap door in the ceiling. I just have to get to it.

Here’s the thing: light is an invaluable resource in DUSKFALL. Which sounds a little silly; who doesn’t enjoy a nice, sunny day? But in DUSKFALL, light provides more than a chemical boost. Light stops, even reverses demonic transformations. If you want to keep animals, such as… oh, I don’t know, wild pigs for a random example, you need a means of keeping their enclosure lit through the night.

Lanterns work. Candles can, in the right amount and if they’re watched closely. But if the light level flickers below a certain threshold with either option, the changes will begin. The best method is a mage light, but those are rare and expensive.

Humanoids are the only creatures which don’t turn. I don’t know why. No one does; the narrative that was promised in alpha stages never emerged. All we had were fragmented pieces of lore tossed around on the early forums. There was something about another continent? One that got wiped out? That’s all I remember.

While I ruminate on this, I prop the door open and sort through the mess inside.

That whoever designed this place was purposely keeping light out is odd. If anything, I should think you’d want to maximize light exposure. Maybe it’s to keep interior lights from being noticed at night?

Seems plausible, sure, but if it were just that why not cover the windows in wax paper and be done? Both outbuildings were handled that way. Sure, it wouldn’t hide the light entirely, and, sure, these windows were higher than the exterior wall, but wax paper would mute the light, making it harder to see at a distance. Surely that was an easier solution than chiseling an angle into the stone.

I need a closer look. Unfortunately, I haven’t come up with a ladder yet.

It’s taken a few hours, but I’ve divided things into three piles: one next to the door for broken, nonessential things that could be converted into raw materials, another pile on a righted table for items in decent shape, and a final stack of items I’m not sure about beside to the excavated fireplace.

As expected, there’s nothing of particular value. The pile of “decent” goods contains: a tin plate and cup, a handful of slightly bent utensils, a dulled cooking knife, a stone mortar missing its pestle, and the broom I’ve been using to sweep soiled hay out the door and into the yard below. The salvage pile is larger, composed of broken furniture and shredded rags.

Given the size of the castle and the wealth represented by the outbuildings, I can’t believe the NPCs who lived here were this poor. Whomever killed them clearly stole the bulk of what was here. Disappointing, not surprising.

And then I find the ladder. Rather, I find the pieces.

Gathering up the ripped edges of the mattress, I prepare to tug it like an over-sized laundry sack to the far corner. The hay desperately needs to be changed. Unfortunately, I don’t have the means to do so, and would rather not sleep on the floor when it isn’t necessary. As I lift the bundle away, however, I notice broken pieces of rope-bound wood beneath the bed’s cracked frame.

Another thrill of unease grips me as set the mattress aside in favour of fishing the jigsaw remains of the ladder out from beneath the bed. They broke the ladder? And… hid it beneath the bed…?

The robbers wouldn’t have any reason to break the ladder, or hide it, or anything. As I’m thinking this, my eye catches the faintest metal gleam in the shadows beneath the bed frame.

A hook? No, a latch.

A trap door. My breath catches.

After a few minutes of shoving at the heavy, solid wood frame, I’ve pushed the bed far enough to the side that I can clearly see the iron-ringed hatch set into the floor. I am such a dumbass. Why it hadn’t occurred to me to look for one before?

The second story entrance wasn’t odd. In fact, it’s a common castle building technique; keep the entrance high so you can pull up the bridge and wait out a seige if your walls are breached. However, in that scenario the second story wasn’t living space. It should have been barracks for farm hands or guards, or a weapon’s room.

Of course, this is a video game, not real life. It’s weird I keep having to remind myself of that, but there it is. Everything here is dictated by what the video game designers chose to put in, or research or—OK, this isn’t helpful.

I stop thinking about it, and return to the problem: I’m have no idea what’s down there.

Best scenario, a larder. Worse scenario… someone hiding? It seems like I would have heard them by now.

And I’m wasting time speculating when there’s only one way this ends.

The trap door swings open with ease, revealing an intact ladder set at an angle. It disappears quickly into inky darkness. I hesitate, listening for anything—a breath, a scurry of rats, a whimper of someone hiding—any of these things seem possible. But I hear nothing.

I need a light. A torch is easiest, and there ought to be enough scrap to make one if the old recipe holds true.

After a second’s hesitation, I leave the trap door open and return to my scrap pile. If there’s anyone inside, they’re free to leave so far as I’m concerned. A chair leg seems perfect for a torch, particularly when combined with some cloth scraps wrapped around one end. I just need to ignite it somehow.

Flint and steel can create a spark. Too bad I don’t have any.

There was magic in the alpha, but it was difficult to master and never my forte. I could spend the next few hours attempting to light this with my mind alone, but the mere idea of it makes my temples throb. Or maybe that’s dehydration.

Either way, the next easiest method is the old stick-plus-tinder friction trick. There’s wood enough in the castle, and tinder. All I’m missing is a good length of strong thread or sinew. But I know where to find some.

I step outside, ducking around the bridge to take a long look around my little kingdom. The sun hangs at an acute angle, barely visible above the western treeline. I’ll have to be quick, particularly with the gaping hole in the wall where the gate ought to be.

Lowering the bridge takes even more effort than it had earlier. I’m slowing down. A drawbridge seems more and more reasonable; that may need to take higher priority, though my list is already unmanageably long.

This would be easier with another person.

I pause halfway down the steps, struck by the enormity of that thought.

It’s true. I know it’s true. If there were one other person—just one—we could’ve made so much progress today. They could clean, I could fix the gate; we might’ve even found food or water.

After Rob, I swore I would never play Duskfall with someone else in my space again. Someone online to talk to—sure. I liked voice chat as much as the next person. But I build alone. I provide for me. I protect myself. The simple wanting of another person to share the burden is as foreign as these game mechanics. I don’t like it.

Besides, it doesn’t matter. There’s no one else here. No matter how I feel about the subject, I am alone.

I shake myself and continue moving, startled to realize how dim the light has gotten while I was dazed by wishful thinking. That’s happening more and more often. Not. Good.

Jogging to the workshop would take effort I can’t quite bring myself to expend, though I know I should. My brain knows I should. My body says it isn’t worth the energy. Neither is caring.

I get there eventually, unlatching the door and leaving it open while I root through the stored supplies. Whoever this killer was, I’d love to know what they took from this place. It’s strange how many supplies were left. Almost as strange as leaving this castle open for anyone to find.

Strange, but lucky for me.

With a half-hearted smile of delight, I pull a long length of treated sinew from a drawer. The resulting pop-up tells me it’s good enough to qualify as bowstring, which is such a lucky find I’m mildly surprised when I don’t tear up. Probably because I can’t. My eyes feel gritty, not damp.

A long, low growl cuts through my joy like a knife across the throat.