Faye and the others were resting after they had banished the Ancient Spectre — saying ‘killed’ seemed odd for something already dead… or that had already died? Faye was not sure what the correct terminology was for the undead.

Does one kill undead? she wondered.

She looked over at Taveon as he stirred the pot that hung from a tripod over their small fire.

“Do you kill the undead, Taveon?” she asked.

The older man looked up with raised eyebrows, though his eyes soon returned to watch the pot. He hummed. “That is an age-old question. The answer to which has ravaged minds for centuries. There are scholars who say that in truth, the act of killing is only possible of a sentient being and that the undead, beings of mindless violence and hunger, are incapable of thought and therefore are not killed, but are vanquished…” he took the spoon out of the pot and used the tip of his finger to catch some of the soup. He stuck it in his mouth and murmured appreciatively. “Of course, there are others that say the distinction lies not in the creature being harmed, but in the actor themselves. If the actor is causing harm enough to cause a being to cease being, then… well… it is ‘to kill’.”

Faye looked at Gavan, who shrugged. “So, you don’t know.”

Taveon looked up sharply, then broke out into a grin. “I do not.” He shrugged. “At the end of the day, it matters more what you are attempting to say. If you want to humanise the defeated spectre, then you can say you murdered it. If you want to distance yourself from the act, you say that it was ‘removed from the ruin’, or, better yet, ‘the spectre will no longer trouble adventurers’. The final act is hidden, we are distracted by the value provided wandering, unfortunate souls.”

At this, they all looked over at the row of bodies they had laid out on the marble-like stone of the spectre’s former haunt. The bodies were wrapped in shrouds, each one carefully prepared.

After the fight, Faye and the others had quietly walked up to the smooth stone surface of the dilapidated room and easily found the bodies there.

Fortunately, through either some magical effect or trick of the climate this high in the mountains, the bodies had not grown rotten. Instead, they were desiccated — all the moisture drawn out. The lack of moisture had effectively mummified the bodies into the positions they had landed in.

Deciding that they were going to transport the bodies as they were, they had simply wrapped the bodies — gear and all — and lined them up as respectfully as they could manage.

Gavan was more withdrawn than usual.

Faye had caught him staring at one of the wrapped corpses. She was unsure what to say. Just as she opened her mouth, a memory came to her.

It was of her mother.

Faye sat at the kitchen table, toying with her food. Her legs did not reach the floor from the cold surface of the chair, but she kept them wrapped around one another rather than let them swing like she would normally. Her parents were arguing again.

They had gone into the front room. Her mam always insisted on ‘talking’ in another room, despite Faye being able to hear everything as clear as if it were right there, beside her.

That time had been bad. Worse than usual, because of something her father had found. A letter, Faye remembered. It had not looked too important. A simple, brown envelope.

Her mam joined her in the kitchen. She was crying but tried to hide it.

“Hello, poppet. Eat up, or your tea’ll get cold.”

Faye looked down. She had not eaten a single chip. She had taken a single, small bite of a chicken nugget. She could not eat more. Her stomach roiled and threatened to squeeze itself into knots.

“Not hungry,” she whispered. She looked down at her lap. She hated looking at her mam when she was sad. Her mam wanted to be strong, Faye knew. Wanted Faye to only see her smile, or be serious, or anything but be sad.

She had been sad a lot.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Mam said. Her voice wobbled a little. As a kid, Faye had not heard the undercurrent in her mam’s voice, but somehow in the clarity of the memory it was plain as day. Her mother had been in a lot of pain. “I’m so sorry…”

“What are you sorry for?”

Faye tensed. She hunched up. Her hair dropped to cover her face and she did all she could to avoid his eye.

“Nothing,” her mam said.

“Fucking liar.”

Faye could feel her mam’s fingers clench on her shoulder, but a moment later they released, and she stood up. She took Faye’s plate from the table and moved it to the counter.

“I don’t want you filling her head with shite…”

“Not in front of Faye.”

It was usually enough to stop him. Normally, he would grunt and stalk out of the room. He would stomp up the stairs, or slam the front door, or go out into the garden and light up a ciggie.

Not this time.

“Don’t you try telling me what to do in my house!”

“I said, not in front of Faye!” her mother shouted back.

Faye looked up, then. She had to. The look of anger on her father’s face was ragged, twisted in hate. His eyes were wide, bloodshot. With a jolt, Faye realised something about her old man in that moment.

He had been drinking. Of course he had. She had always thought the drinking came later.

The man in her memory was not quite who she had remembered, all those years growing up. He had taken on a darker, blurred figure in her mind. But not now. Now, he had come into focus more than anything else in the room. If the wallpaper had not been left unchanged for over a decade, Faye would not remember the pattern on that day… but his face, his eyes… the way his nostrils flared.

He slapped her mam. Hard.

Her mam had no choice that day, she had to let Faye see her cry.

Faye gasped.

The memory faded.

“What the fuck?” she whispered.

“Everything okay, Faye?” Taveon asked. He had stopped stirring the pot. It was simply bubbling away over the fire, now.

She shook her head a little. “I’m not sure. The bane… is gone. The system said so. But now… I’m remembering things that I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to remember.”

Taveon’s face fell. “I’m sorry. That must be difficult.”

Faye felt tears well in her eyes. She let them fall. Despite the memories that were swirling in her mind, she did not feel suffocated by them. The weight of them had fallen away with the killing of the spectre.

I’m going to own that kill, she thought. The thing deserved it for what it did to that team.

Of course, that did not change the fact that the memories were something she had clearly buried deeply in her psyche.

A very different sensation welled to the top of her chest, threatening to spill out.

Grief.

“Taveon?” she asked, her voice quivering.

“Yes?”

“Can I tell you something?” she asked, again, swallowing around the pain.

“Of course.”

“My mother died.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Taveon said. His voice was gentle. Faye was listening but could not bring herself to look at him. Instead, she stared into the fire as her tears blurred her vision.

“Recently. She… she died very recently. Probably only a month before I found myself… here.”

Taveon did not say anything. She did not need him to.

“I don’t think I—” she started, but a sob broke her sentence in half. “I, I don’t think I said goodbye. I didn’t want to. Couldn’t accept it.”

“It’s always incredibly hard when we lose someone close to us.”

Faye hugged her knees to her chest.

“It was hard,” she said. “My mam was disabled. Was sick for a lot of my childhood. I would… avoid it. Wouldn’t stay around. Ran outside and played havoc as much as I could to make sure I didn’t have to go back to the house.”

The fire crackled and popped, the wood spitting out its moisture just like the adventuring team’s bodies had. She could not get the image of their shrunken features out of her mind. Those images merged with the crystal-clear picture she had of her mother’s declining health.

“It took years. So, so long… and for her to give up. I think that, really, a part of her died the day it started. She lost something. Took a few years for him to leave.”

Faye wiped angrily at her eyes. She could see again, but the tears made things blurry again a moment later.

“The bastard stuck around for years, blaming her. Telling us it was our fault for making him angry. It was our fault for doing things we shouldn’t do. He’d told us not to! It was his house, his rules, and breaking the rules meant that we had to be punished!”

She had gotten louder, she realised. But she could no more quieten herself than she could stop, at that point. Gavan had looked up and moved closer to the fire, but Faye only paid him half a mind.

The rest of her mind was fixated on her memories.

“Of course, the twisted fucker knew the best way to get what he wanted. Mam would always break first, just break down and do whatever he wanted. Even if it was his fault. Especially if it was mine. But I learned not to make many mistakes. Easier to do when I’m not there. But I was a kid, so it wasn’t like I had anywhere to go really.”

She paused. For years, her memories of her childhood had been jumbled up. It was only now that she realised just how… short a time span it had been, really, between the start of the problem and the climax.

“It feels like forever, when you’re a kid,” she said. “The six weeks’ holidays feel like a lifetime! But, looking back, it was only a few months really.”

Taveon and Gavan were still staring at her. She looked up at them but quickly averted her eyes, wiping them again.

“Look, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to—”

“No, no, lass… it’s alright. You talk through what you need to talk through.”

She sniffed and tried not to let it show much that simple kindness was affecting her. She grimaced, thinking it was probably the most obvious thing in the world. But a part of her did not care. It was past time to talk about her mother.

Hiding it from even herself had caused more than one problem.

“The truth is,” she said, “my father caused my mam’s death. He hit her. I won’t go into it. But he did it enough that one time she fell. Hit her head. He didn’t call the ambulance. I did. I was twelve. I was only twelve and I had to call the fucking ambulance, because that idiot thought she was faking.”

Unclenching her hands, she looked up to see an echo of the same fire inside her in her companions’ eyes.

“Paramedics did the best they could. Probably saved her life. The doctors, too. But she wasn’t the same after that. It was enough to get my dad thrown in prison, out of our lives. My auntie came to live with us. Mam’s family hadn’t known what was happening, of course. She’d kept everyone in the dark. Tried to keep even me in the dark.”

“Faye…” Taveon ventured, but her name stuck in his throat and it broke off into a croak.

She inhaled, deeply, and sat up straight. “She got worse, over time, until she let herself slip away. Like I said, that was a couple of months ago. I hadn’t… talked about it, until now because—”

“There’s no reason to make an excuse!” Taveon interrupted.

“None at all,” Gavan said, but he locked eyes with her. “But I understand. I promise you that your mother would not want you to lock this away for it to fester.”

“Aye,” Taveon muttered, “let it out, let it all out.”

Faye smiled. She was a far sight from ‘fine’, she figured, but she had finally put a foot on the path to being fine.

“Thank you, for listening.”

Gavan nodded, coming closer and sitting down. She looked at him and he shrugged. “Didn’t want to interrupt.”

She laughed at that. It was a silly gesture, but sweet, nonetheless. Taveon chuckled and shoved a bowl towards them both.

“Come on, let’s eat. There are some tests and rituals we wanted to try. That wind will chill us to the bone if we’re not careful. This will warm you up.”

He was not wrong. The soup was delicious. Thick, using meat and some grains that Taveon must have packed especially. The meat was chewy, but the soak in the water of the soup had softened it to a flavourful chunk.

As she ate, she quietly thought more about her loving mother as she had been in Faye’s early childhood: young, careless with her laughter, and quick to cuddle and kiss Faye on the cheek. They were warm memories, untainted by what came after, but until now they had been buried under the detritus of her early teenage years.

She smiled.

Later, Taveon and Gavan were making measurements and casting rituals and spells, walking to and fro and arguing with one another over this or that. Faye did not have a single clue as to what they were arguing over and found that she could not get a word in edgewise to interrupt and get clarification.

Which meant that she could meditate and consolidate some of the changes that she had been going through in the time since she had come to this world.

First, she checked her status.

~ Status ~

[Name:] Faye Weaver

[Class:] Spellsword

[Level:] 12

[Aspect:] n/a

[Boons:] Experience boost (x2), Sprite’s Touch

[Banes:] n/a

[Stat Growth:] Tou+2, Str+1, Rea+2, Agi+1, Int+1, Wil+3

~ Attributes ~

[Toughness:] 27

[Strength:] 26

[Reaction:] 18

[Agility:] 19

[Logic:] 10

[Intuition:] 17

[Willpower:] 22

[Charisma:] 10

[Magic:] 1.5

~ Skill List ~

[Skill Points:] 1

[Mana Sense] [Tier 1 - 2/5]

[Spellcasting — Basic] [Tier 0 - 3/5]

[Swordfighting — Intermediate] [Tier 0 - 5/5]

[Swordfighter's Sense] [Tier 0 - 5/5] [Locked]

[Survival — Basic] [Tier 0 - 4/10]

~ Spell List ~

[Fire Dart] [Tier 0 - 4/5]

[Scorching Lance] [Tier 1 - 1/5]

[Blades of Flame] [Tier 1 - 2/5]

She thought about the Ancient Spectre. It had been a level eighteen, the system had said, but she had not gained enough experience to level up. She was sure it had something to do with the party taking it down, rather than her working on her own, but she supposed she would need to figure out how to level more effectively moving forward.

That empty slot next to [Banes] made her feel so good. It had been looming over her for so long. And, if she judged the effects of it being removed correctly, it seemed to have a bigger benefit on her mental health than she had even guessed it would have.

Thinking ahead to the mission the Administrator had given her, there were a lot of things she still had to learn, and the way ahead would not be easy. If anything, life would find something else to throw at her, she was sure.

But, looking over her status, Faye felt more ready for an adventure than she had only a day before. There was a lot of room for improvement, sure, she knew. But that would be easily found whilst travelling to the city. Once she got there, well, there would surely be something to challenge her and she would rise to the challenge, as she always had, meeting it head on.

Gavan interrupted her musings.

“Taveon, Faye, I’ve found something!” he shouted.