Thorin's First Thundersday of Harvestfall, 1442, Gloam-Barrow Den, final chamber.

Leoric blinked, the afterimage of violet fire still burning in his eyes. For a moment, he wondered if the fight was over, or if the next phase was about to start. Then the air shattered with familiar chimes.

"Dungeon Duty Completed! Bonus rewards granted: First time bonus, swift completion of all objectives, no adventure casualty in your party."

"You have reached level twenty for the ranger class. You have reached level twenty-one for the ranger class."

"Bonus rewards granted: secret condition met! You have stopped the plague doctor without killing him."

"You have reached level twenty-two for the ranger class."

"You have unlocked the ability Barrage."

The intrusive notifications filled his vision with a cheerful fanfare completely at odds with the sight before him. Lyn lay on the ground, hunched as if she had been gutted, smoke still clinging to her fingers. The doctor had not moved. Elyssia's stance was taut, her eyes locked on him. Vaelith's tail matched hey eyes, flicking left and right, between the doctor and Lyn.

Leoric frowned in disgust at the chest that materialised in the centre of the room. Then he dismissed the notification windows with a sharp flick of his hand. None of this mattered. Not the XP, not the loot.

He slung his bow across his back and, with a few quick strides, rushed to Lyn's side. He dropped to one knee beside her. "Hey. Talk to me. You still with us?"

Her eyes flickered, glassy and unfocused, as if she were staring straight through him. Leoric put a hand lightly on her shoulder, not shaking, just steadying.

"Lyn, are you okay?" he tried again.

Her lips parted, but the answer came raw, rasping. "…It's not Lyn."

Leoric's chest tightened. A flash of memory—her desperate declaration, just as she had released that strange, unholy bolt of magic.

What was that all about, anyway?

He swallowed. "Right. Sorry, Kaelyn."

A beat. Her eyes finally locked on his, but there was no recognition in them, only dread. "No—not her either."

The words cut colder than any dungeon chill. If this was neither Lyn nor Kaelyn, then, by Leoric's reckoning, he figured this might be his first actual contact with the player behind the pair.

Awkwardly, he looked down at his hand resting on the priestess' shoulder and wondered if he should keep it there or yank it away. He had yet to get familiar with male socialisation rituals. Was touching someone's shoulder appropriate? Surely it had to be when someone was in distress?

More importantly, however, he did not even know how the person in front of him wished to be addressed or treated—whether as a man or a woman.

So Leoric opted to use the indefinite "they" until corrected.

The body beneath his palm twitched. Their fingers curled tight, as though trying to crush themselves into fists, then loosened again. Their gaze darted down to their own hands—Kaelyn's hands—and they stared at them with something close to revulsion. A small tremor ran through them.

"Kaelyn's gone…" their voice cracked. They cleared their throat, but it did not help. The words came out clipped, flat, every syllable dragged through clenched teeth. "That's why I'm here…"

Leoric let the silence hang for a breath, steadying his own pulse before he replied. He kept his tone soft, even. "Gone? Can you elaborate?"

They frowned. Their eyes flicked up for a second, then away again, fastening on the black stone floor. They tugged at the edge of the robe, as though the fabric itself was choking them. They slowly shook their head, as if they could not say the words. But after a beat, they spoke anyway. "She's in a state of shock—some kind of crisis. I can feel it all—in the back of my mind. She's not doing well."

"What about Lyn?" Leoric asked, wondering where she had gone.

Their gaze drifted away from Leoric as their shoulders sagged. "She's with her. Trying to help."

"Okay." Leoric gently nudged Ryan's chin up and towards him. "So—since you're the one here now, how do you want us to call you?"

Another long pause. Then, at last, the smallest answer, ground out like it hurt to say it: "…Just keep using Kaelyn?"

Leoric frowned. It is one thing to respect someone's self-determination, but right now, he really struggled to accept this answer at face value. He could tell whoever was in control at the moment, they truly struggled with this body, this name.

"Is that what you truly want, or are you doing this for her sake?"

"No," they admitted. "I…"

Their gaze met Leoric's. They swallowed and then averted their gaze once more. "I suppose… while she's gone… You can call me Ryan."

"Ryan," Leoric echoed the name, quiet but certain, letting the name settle between them. He gave a small nod. "Got it."

Something in Ryan's posture shifted—still rigid, still miserable, but not entirely alone anymore.

Leoric glanced towards his other companions. Elyssia and Vaelith had both relaxed their fighting stance, although just barely. Elyssia was still watching the doctor, apparently expecting to have to fight him despite the notifications. Vaelith's gaze was now fixed on Ryan's face, and Leoric could plainly see the pity—or was it understanding?—on the dracan's face.

He stayed crouched there a moment longer, bow forgotten on his back, his hand still on Ryan's shoulder. He let the silence stretch, because sometimes silence mattered more than words.

Meanwhile, his mind was already turning. From what he could tell, Lyn had been with them for most of the dungeon. Until Kaelyn suddenly ripped control out of her hands.

Her outburst of fury at the plague doctor, the way her magic had twisted black-violet instead of gold, the way she had collapsed as she ripped something out of him, taking it inside her form—nothing about this had felt normal. She used a spell that certainly did not belong in any priest's repertoire.

It had not felt like a boss fight so much as one of those elusive conversation-wheel options in single-player RPGs—the kind that lets you skip the entire encounter and that only pops up if you have chased every side quest, uncovered the buried lore, and met the secret conditions.

This stirred an uncomfortable echo within him, because Leoric knew what it was like to feel the weight of a past that was not supposed to be his. He could still picture the bitter look on his father's face when he had finally returned home. The disdain in his sister's gaze. But also the warm welcome of his mother, and the familiar cooking. The thump of the family dog's tail against the floorboards—pure joy, unbothered by human grudges. Miska's smile at the market—something fragile and wistful—gone too soon.

None of those moments were his. And yet they had felt as if they were. The moments had not felt like cut-scenes; they had felt like remembering.

He had never asked the others whether they had felt the same. Elyssia did not appear to invest herself in the game that way—she had left her starting town without really doing anything there, according to what she told him on the day they met.

Maybe Vaelith had had a similar experience to his own, but she kept it hidden under her quiet composure.

However, Ryan—Ryan had just admitted Kaelyn was drowning in something only she seemed to remember.

"Ryan…" Leoric spoke softly, testing the name again. "Do you know what triggered all of this? Do you have any memories that don't belong to you, but still feel like they do?"

Ryan's jaw clenched. His gaze flicked up for half a heartbeat, then away, back down to those too-delicate hands. "… Memories? Maybe? I've had a few. Scenes I didn't live. Stuff she—Kaelyn—remembers. Not me." He swallowed, voice taut. "I get short flashbacks. Not the whole life. Just… enough to hurt."

Leoric nodded, not pressing further. It was confirmation enough. The game was giving them more than avatars, more than skins. It was giving them histories—and not everyone got the same share of them.

He let the answer sit for a moment before speaking again. "Can you recall anything specific about the doctor? It appears Kaelyn had a grudge against him about something."

Ryan winced. His hands curled tighter in the robe's fabric, pulling it like he could tear himself out of it. He shook his head, jaw working, words dragging like they had to be pried loose. "No, I… I don't think so. I don't get her whole story, just… shards. Nightmares. Being in her room at the orphanage. Or her life before that, when she was younger and her mother was still around." His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard. "I know she blames him—hates him—but it's not my hate. It's hers. I just get… splinters of it."

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Leoric studied him quietly. It was not just fear in Ryan's voice—it was that strange mix of distance and closeness he knew too well. He remembered his visit to Altansuun, the way memories of his past had only surfaced as he encountered people he should have known. Almost as if the memories were added straight into his mind as he needed them. None of those moments had been Sophie's, but now his memories lived side by side with hers, making it nearly impossible to determine which past was real, and which was not.

And now Ryan was confirming it. Kaelyn's grudge had bled into him the way Leoric's past had bled into Sophie. But Ryan only got the pieces sharp enough to cut.

Ryan's voice trailed off into silence, his eyes fixed on the floor. Leoric gave him space, resisting the urge to fill it. He was still piecing together what he had just admitted when another voice, low and weary, cut across the chamber.

"Allow me. Perhaps I can explain in her stead then, if she cannot."

Leoric's hand went instinctively to his bow, but the man standing behind them made no move to threaten. The plague mask was gone, tucked under one arm. His face was lined with age, hair iron-grey, burrovian ears drooping with exhaustion rather than alertness. Without the mask, he looked less like a monster and more like a man who had carried his own sentence for too long.

The doctor's gaze flicked toward Ryan—Kaelyn's body, Ryan's eyes—and lingered there with something like recognition. "You deserve the truth," he said quietly. "Even if it damns me."

The doctor's eyes flicked toward Ryan again, searching, as though he could still see Kaelyn's shadow behind him. His voice was low, stripped of the theatrical cadence he had wielded before.

"Sousiane—this girl's mother—was a patient under my care. And I couldn't save her." His jaw tightened, the words grinding out like broken glass. "Hers was an all too common tale. Like many, she was too poor and lived too far from Luminara to receive magical aid from Luxoria's priests. I was her only hope." He drew a shuddering breath. "And like many before her, I failed her. I told myself I would find another way, some method that could save the next mother, the next child. That is how… this began." His gaze swept across the broken husks on the tables, shame written in every furrow of his face.

Ryan's throat worked, but no sound came out. Leoric could feel the tremor in his shoulder under his hand—revulsion, grief, or both.

Vaelith and Elyssia both closed the gap. The sylvani had her weapons lowered but not sheathed. The dracan's voice was sharp, though not unkind—demanding clarity. "How, though? How does it lead from one patient to this?"

The doctor's gaze dropped to the floor, then back to the twisted corpses lining his benches. His voice was steady, but hollow. "One failed patient led to another. Then to an entire family. Then to an entire village. I couldn't save them. Not a single one of them."

Elyssia's grip tightened on her tonfa. "So you started… stitching corpses together?"

His hands flexed once at his sides. "Not to mock them. Not to replace them. To use them. I could not bear for more innocents to fall to this sickness. For every poor soul who fell ill, it would be a race against the clock to save them—how long before someone realised the disease had infected them? How quickly would the news reach me, and how soon could I reach them? So, rather than waiting for new victims, I chose this. If I could give the bodies of the dead a new purpose—just enough for a life, I could infect them. Then I could try as many times as needed. I wouldn't have to wait for the next village, the next child, to fall ill before I tested another cure."

Vaelith's brow furrowed, scales along her temple catching the guttering light. "You infected your… constructs. Over and over. So you could experiment without living patients."

The doctor's shoulders sagged. His voice broke with the admission. "Yes. I convinced myself it was mercy. That by defiling the dead, I could spare the living." He looked at his hands, fingers trembling now without the scalpel. "But after enough failures, I stopped seeing them as mothers, fathers, sons, or daughters. They became vessels. Samples. And when you stop seeing people as people…" His eyes swept the ruin of the chamber—the fallen husks, the unstitched forms—and closed with visible shame. "…this is where you end."

Leoric's throat went tight. Under his palm, Ryan shivered violently, Kaelyn's grief bleeding through him like a current.

The doctor's voice dwindled into silence, his hands trembling at his sides. For a moment, the only sound in the chamber was the slow drip of fluid from a shattered vial.

Elyssia broke it with a voice as hard as her tonfa. "The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions."

Her words landed heavy, not shouted, but edged with the certainty of someone who had seen too many corpses stacked on someone's "good idea." She kept her weapons lowered, but her stance stayed taut, ready.

Vaelith folded her arms, expression unreadable, though her tail twitched with restrained fury. "Intentions don't excuse what you became," she said quietly.

Leoric said nothing. He kept his hand steady on Ryan's shoulder, watching the young man's throat work as Kaelyn's grief rippled through him. If Elyssia's words had been a blade, they seemed to cut him, too.

After a beat, Leoric finally broke the silence, his voice low but steady. "Then tell me this, doctor—what did she do to you? Why are you here, speaking with us like this, instead of raising your scalpel again?"

The man's gaze flicked to Ryan—Kaelyn's body, but someone else's eyes—and lingered there. A muscle jumped in his jaw.

"She tore something from me—took it from me, into herself," he admitted. "Something I thought I would carry to my grave. My guilt. My penance. It was the weight that let me keep walking this path—convinced me that every failure demanded I go further. And if I could not find a cure, then people like you would eventually find me. Bring my madness to an end. In the state of mind I was in, both outcomes were equally appealing."

"You… did this on purpose. You all but gave up on trying to find a cure, but couldn't allow yourself to stop trying. So you got sloppy. You wanted people to find you, to put an end to it all. All because you couldn't stop yourself?" Vaelith asked, aghast.

The doctor nodded slowly. "I swore an oath to each of the patients I failed, that I would not stop trying until I died. That I would give their death some meaning."

Leoric grimaced. Following the letter of the law rather than the spirit of his oath, then.

The doctor's hands trembled as he raised them, staring at the unsteady fingers. "When she struck me, I felt all of my guilr rip away. Like a splinter pulled from bone. For the first time in nearly a decade, I could see… without it." He swallowed hard, voice cracking. "And all I saw was horror. No grand design. No noble sacrifice. Just corpses. The corpses I left in my wake." He lowered his hands, eyes haunted but lucid. "So you ask why I speak calmly now? It is not calm. It is emptiness. She took the fire that drove me. Without it… I have nothing left but the truth."

The doctor's words seemed to echo, leaving only the drip of some half-coagulated fluid in their wake.

"But how did she do it?" Elyssia's frown deepened. She gestured toward Ryan with a tilt of her chin. "What was that spell she used? That wasn't any priest's light magic I've ever seen."

Ryan blinked, dazed, then dragged a hand down his face. "It's not light magic." The words tumbled out before he seemed to realise he was saying them. "She's played you all since the start—none of it is."

Vaelith tilted her head. "Can you explain?"

"Yes… I saw that—I lived through it—" He swallowed hard. "At the orphanage, Kaelyn could not use light magic. She never had the talent for it. So her teacher, Mother Vervaine, showed her a different path. Shadow, not light."

Leoric frowned. "But we've seen you use holy magic over and over…"

"It's not. You can make things brighter not only by adding more light, but by taking in the darkness. Subtractive, not additive. That's what her 'healing' really is—she doesn't mend wounds. She takes them. All of them. Everyone's pain, everyone's sickness… she pulls it into herself."

Leoric's chest tightened. The phrasing felt wrong. Sacrifice, self-destruction.

Vaelith's tail flicked sharply once, then stilled. "Then, this situation was an inevitable outcome. She couldn't keep taking it in forever without breaking one day."

Ryan shivered again beneath Leoric's palm, his breath sharp and uneven. The silence stretched, heavy with the stink of alchemical fumes and blood.

It was Vaelith who broke it, her voice sharp but threaded with worry. "Then what now?" She gestured toward Ryan—toward Kaelyn's body. "What happens to all the guilt she took from the doctor? Where does it go?"

The doctor's eyes sank toward the floor. For once, he did not have an immediate answer. His breath rasped in and out, every exhale sounding older, weaker.

Leoric's hand tightened on Ryan's shoulder, steadying the tremor that ran through him. The question was already etched on his face, even if he could not bring himself to voice it.

At last, the doctor said, "If she truly took it into herself… then it is hers now. The years of failure. The weight of every last breath I could not save." His eyes shut, lids trembling. "A burden heavy enough to crush any soul that tries to carry it."

Elyssia's jaw tightened, her stance shifting half a step closer, like she might strike him after all. "So you've damned her with your misery, as surely as with your experiments."

"No," the doctor whispered. "I did not give it to her. She took it from me. That is what I cannot understand." His gaze lifted, finding Ryan's eyes again. "Why would she claim such agony when she could have let me die with it?"

"To spite you…" Ryan started, his voice low and uneven. "She wanted you to carry it on—the knowledge of all the horrors you did. Without the petty excuses that blinded you to them." He faltered, blinking rapidly, as if a puzzle had just shifted into place in his mind. His words came halting, but with new conviction. "The day her mother died… you weren't there. You were gone when she finally came back. And I think…" His throat bobbed, the next words scraped out like they cost him. "I think she wanted you to feel the same anguish she's lived with ever since. To know what it's like to come back and find nothing left but loss."

The doctor flinched, the mask tucked under his arm creaking as his fingers tightened around it. For the first time, he looked away—not at his corpses, not at his hands, but toward the floor, unable to meet any of their eyes.

Leoric felt Ryan trembling beneath his palm, the words leaving him as jagged as the grief behind them.

"And… I think she hates herself for running away on that day. For missing the moment of her mother's death. For leaving her little sister alone to keep vigil…" Ryan froze, the words tumbling out of him before he realised what he'd said. His mouth hung open, stunned. "…Her little sister?" he echoed, bewildered.

Leoric's brows knit. He glanced instinctively toward Vaelith, then Elyssia—both looked just as startled.

"Is that an important detail?" Elyssia asked.

Ryan shook his head hard, as if trying to dislodge the memory that was not his. "I—I don't know? I didn't know anything about having a sibling. It just—" He pressed both hands to his temples. "It just came out."

The doctor's face drained of colour. His lips parted, but no words followed, only a ragged exhale that said more than silence ever could.

Leoric's stomach tightened. Whatever Kaelyn had dredged up from the depths of this man's guilt, Ryan was choking on it now—and it was more than any of them had expected.

Vaelith's gaze darted to catch the doctor's, then approached Leoric and Ryan, knelt down, and gently took one of Ryan's hands in both of hers. "If she held on to all that regret, for all those years… if it all festered into self-hatred, and then added all the doctor's guilt… you're probably going to stay in control for a while, Ryan. Until she clears her head, at the latest."

Leoric watched the look of horror spread across Ryan's face as Vaelith's words sank in. His mouth opened once, closed, then opened again, the air catching sharply in his throat.

"Me? Stay in control?" he rasped. His eyes darted down at the too-delicate hands, still trapped between Vaelith's steady palms. "You mean—like this? Like her? While she's… drowning in all that?" His voice pitched higher, panic edging in.

Vaelith's grip held steady, her expression calm, but Leoric could see the tension in her jaw. "It's not forever. But right now, she's buried. You must be strong, or the three of you risk getting pulled under with her."

Ryan rocked his head, tugging once at his hands before giving up. His shoulders hunched inward, every line of his body rejecting what he had just heard. "I can't. I don't want this—this face, this body, this…" His voice cracked, thin and brittle.

Leoric shifted, his hand firm again on Ryan's shoulder, grounding him. "Breathe, Ryan. You're not alone in this. You don't have to want it—you just have to keep going until she finds her way back."

Ryan's eyes flicked up at him, wild and glassy, like a man shoved onto a battlefield without armour. And Leoric felt his own stomach twist. Vaelith was right—and he could tell Ryan knew it.

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