The silence after the knight knelt was worse than its movement.
It was a watchful silence. A heavy, sentient quiet that pressed on Kaelen's eardrums. The synth-pop tune from the System was a feeble, ridiculous defense against it, like trying to ward off a thunderstorm with a kazoo.
He stood frozen, his mind racing.
Affection: 7.
It can decay.
This wasn't a one-time check. It was a relationship to be maintained. He was trapped in a grand hall with a creature of legend, and his life depended on being a good… boyfriend? Therapist? He didn't know the word.
The cold was the first real, mundane threat to reassert itself. It gnawed through his suit jacket. He wrapped his arms around himself, his breath puffing out in faint, grey plumes. The knight didn't breathe. It just was.
[AFFECTION METER UPDATE: 7 → 6/100]
A soft, sad chime. The pink heart in his vision lost a tiny sliver of its glow.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through him. It was ticking down. Just from him standing here, not interacting. Emotional drift. The term came to him from a hundred couple's therapy sessions. Connection requires maintenance. Neglect leads to distance.
In this case, distance led to a fifty-foot sword.
Move. Say something. Do something.
But what? The original dialogue window was gone. The System gave no prompts now. It was observing, waiting for him to initiate. This was the "free play" part of the sim. The part where you could explore the character.
His eyes scanned the hall. Aside from the throne and the shattered windows, there were crumbling pillars, faded tapestries that disintegrated at a touch, and piles of… things. Old armor, broken weapons, all dusted with a fine, grey ash. The knight's domain. His prison.
Kaelen took a step. The sound of his shoe on grit was explosively loud. The red coals in the knight's helm tracked the movement, but it didn't rise.
He walked slowly, not towards the knight, but parallel to it, along the wall. He was a psychologist pacing his office. The knight was the client on the couch. A very, very large, armed client.
"It's cold," Kaelen said. His voice was still too quiet. He cleared his throat, forced it louder. A statement of fact. Neutral. Observational. "The hall. It's very cold."
The knight's head tilted a degree. No response. No Affection change.
[AFFECTION METER: 6]
Still ticking.
He needed to re-engage. But the knight had responded to empathy before. To recognition of its burden. He had to go deeper, but without the System's prompting, it was like walking a tightrope blindfolded over a pit of blades.
He stopped near one of the piles of debris. It wasn't just junk. It was arranged. A smaller, human-sized set of plate armor, neatly laid out, a rusted longsword placed on its chest. A tomb. No, many tombs. Dozens of them, lining the edges of the hall.
He looked from the small, arranged armor to the colossal knight on the throne. Gareth the Unforgiven.
"You didn't just wear the armor," Kaelen murmured, the pieces clicking together with a professional's cold clarity. "You became it. You took their weight. All of them."
He wasn't speaking to the knight anymore. He was analyzing aloud. "Survivor's guilt on a metaphysical scale. You believe you failed them. So you carry their forms, their memory, literally on your shoulders. You forged your own punishment."
The knight shifted. A deep, resonant clank echoed. The red eyes blazed for a second.
[AFFECTION METER: 6 → 9/100]
The chime was brighter. The heart pulsed, regaining its lost sliver and adding more.
Correct. Hitting the core trauma. But it was a dangerous game. Poking a raw nerve could lead to breakthrough or breakdown. In a creature of this magnitude, a breakdown would be cataclysmic.
"You keep them neat," Kaelen continued, gentling his tone, turning the analysis into something softer. "You honor them. It's not just a burden. It's a vigil."
The knight's massive hand, which had been resting on its sword hilt, tightened. The metal groaned. Then, slowly, it lifted its hand and placed it over its own heart—or where a heart would be, beneath a foot of steel. A gesture of acknowledgment.
[AFFECTION METER: 9 → 12/100]
Kaelen let out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He was doing it. He was connecting. Using every tool in his arsenal—analysis, reframing, validation—to soothe a monster.
Then, the world changed.
From a shadowed archway to his left, a new shape detached itself from the darkness. It moved wrong. Jerky, skittering, like a broken puppet. It was humanoid, but its limbs were too long, its back contorted. It was made of the same grey, ashy substance as the world, but its eyes shone with a single, pinpoint of hungry orange light.
A low, gurgling hiss escaped it. It wasn't looking at the knight. It was looking at him. Fresh meat. Warm blood.
[HOSTILE ENTITY DETECTED: 'ASHEN STALKER' (CURSED SOLDIER)]
[THREAT LEVEL: LOW (TO A FULLY ARMED KNIGHT)]
[THREAT LEVEL: MORTAL (TO AN UNARMED HUMAN)]
The Stalker charged. Its movement was a horrifying, scrabbling sprint.
Pure, animal terror seized Kaelen. He stumbled back, his heel catching on a loose stone. He fell hard, the impact driving the air from his lungs. The thing was on him in seconds, its long, claw-like fingers reaching for his face, the rotten-sweet smell overwhelming.
I'm going to die. Not to the knight. To a footnote.
The Sorrowful Knight moved. But not fast. It turned its head, observing. It did not rise. It did not draw its sword. The red coals watched, impassive.
It's testing me, Kaelen realized with a burst of icy clarity. The System said 'defend your love.' This is part of it. It wants to see if the connection is worth anything. If I have any strength.
The Stalker's claw swiped down.
Instinct took over. Kaelen threw up his right hand, the hand that held the Whisper of Sorrow.
He didn't know how to use it. He just willed it.
A wave of profound, hollow despair erupted from his palm. It had no physical force. It didn't push the creature back. It invaded it.
The Ashen Stalker froze mid-swipe. The hungry orange light in its eyes sputtered. A sound came from it—not a hiss, but a whimper. A human whimper. For a split second, the twisted ash of its form seemed to blur, and Kaelen saw the ghost of a young man's face, terrified and lost. The Stalker remembered. It remembered its life, its death, its endless, cursed hunger. And the memory was pure agony.
The creature recoiled as if scalded, clutching its head. It scrambled away from Kaelen, back into the shadows, its whimpers fading.
Kaelen lay on the ground, his right arm trembling violently. He felt… drained. Not physically, but emotionally. A deep, sucking emptiness sat in his chest. He had just weaponized grief. He had fired a bullet made of pure sorrow, and the recoil had hollowed him out.
The System chimed.
['WHISPER OF SORROW' USED SUCCESSFULLY.]
[EMOTIONAL BACKLASH: MODERATE. TEMPORARY APATHY DEBUFF DETECTED.]
[OBSERVED ACTION: SELF-DEFENSE USING BORROWED POWER.]
[AFFECTION METER: 12 → 18/100]
The knight had seen him use its power. Had seen him survive. The Affection jump was significant. But Kaelen couldn't feel happy about it. The apathy debuff was settling in, a numbing blanket over his fear and his triumph. He just felt cold and empty.
Slowly, he pushed himself to his feet. He looked at his hand. The grey mist was gone.
He looked at the Sorrowful Knight. The red coals held his gaze. Then, with a sound like a mountain sighing, the knight slowly, deliberately, lifted its free hand and extended a single, colossal finger. It pointed, not at Kaelen, but at a spot near its own feet. A clear invitation. Or an order.
Come closer.
The pop music in Kaelen's head segued into a softer, more sentimental track. The pink interface flashed gently.
[MILESTONE REACHED: AFFECTION > 15.]
[NEW DYNAMIC UNLOCKED: 'PROXIMITY BONDING.']
[CLOSER PHYSICAL DISTANCE MAY SLOW AFFECTION DECAY.]
Kaelen stared at the offered space beside the giant. The place of honor. Or the place of easiest slaughter.
His legs, heavy with exhaustion and emotional drain, began to move. Step by step, he walked across the ash-strewn floor towards the living monument of sorrow. The knight watched him come, a silent king accepting a broken jester.
He stopped a few feet from the massive, tarnished greave. He could feel a faint, dry heat radiating from the metal. He slowly, carefully, sat down on the cold stone floor, leaning back against the warm steel.
The knight's hand lowered, coming to rest on the ground near him, a vast, curved wall of metal. Not touching him. Just… present. A barrier between him and the darkness of the hall.
[AFFECTION DECAY HALTED.]
[CURRENT AFFECTION: 18/100]
The synth-pop melody faded to a barely-there lullaby.
In the profound quiet, Kaelen sat against the leg of a monster, protected by the very thing he was supposed to seduce. He had survived the first threat. He had used a fragment of a broken soul as a weapon.
And as the unnatural night deepened, he understood the true cost.
To survive, he would have to feel every ounce of their sorrow. He would have to make it his own. And he was starting to fear that by the end, there would be nothing of him left to save.