The Last Save She Left

Daniel had not opened the game in the four months since the funeral, and he was not sure why he opened it now, except that the apartment was very quiet and his thumb had been hovering over the icon for an hour.

Welcome back, traveller. It has been 127 days since your last session.

The load screen was Mira's work, all of it — the watercolour mountains, the hand-lettered title, the little fox that trotted across the bottom of the screen and sat down to wait for you. She had spent three years building Hollowmere in the evenings after her real job, a small strange roleplaying world she'd made for the love of making it, and she had been so proud the night it finally went live. Forty-one players, she'd said, glowing, as if it were forty-one million. He'd never had the heart to tell her he found the menus confusing. He'd made one character to please her, a clumsy warrior named Dunmore, and played for an hour, and never gone back.

Now the world bloomed around him, soft and green, and there at the bottom of the screen sat the fox, and Daniel felt the grief come up in him like water in a flooding room.

> Dunmore — Level 3 Warrior
> HP 40/40 · Gold 12 · Quests: 1 active

One active quest. He didn't remember accepting any quest. He opened the log with a thumb that shook only a little.

> QUEST LOG
> ▸ The Lantern at Greywater — In progress
> "Someone is keeping the old lighthouse lit,though the keeper died years ago. Find out who. Find out why."
> Step 3 of 7 · Started: 14 months ago

Fourteen months. He had not played in fourteen months — but the quest had a start date and a progress bar three steps along, and a save state he had never created. He pressed Continue before he could think better of it, and the world resolved into a road at dusk, salt wind, the far cry of gulls, and a figure walking ahead of him toward a lighthouse he had never seen.

She turned when his footsteps reached her.

> Wenna — Lighthouse-Keeper's Daughter
> Friendly · Quest Giver

The NPC was no one he recognised. A woman in a grey coat, brown hair tucked under a knit cap, a way of tilting her head when she listened. The dialogue box opened.

> Wenna: "You came back. I wasn't sure you would. People say they'll come back and then the road takes them somewhere else."
> ▸ I'm sorry I was gone so long.
> ▸ Who are you?
> ▸ [Say nothing]

He chose the first without knowing why. The NPC's face did the small animated thing Mira had been so proud of, the micro-expression engine she'd built herself, and Wenna smiled — and the smile was wrong, or rather it was right, it was exactly, impossibly right, the particular way it climbed the left side first.

> Wenna: "You always say that. You always apologise for things that aren't your fault. Come on. The light won't keep itself."

Daniel sat very still in the dark apartment. You always say that. The line did not fit a stranger NPC met three steps into a quest. It fit someone who knew him. And the head-tilt, and the left-climbing smile, and the gentle scolding about apologising for things that weren't his fault — Mira had said that to him a hundred times, you apologise like it's a nervous habit, Daniel, stop it — and the floor seemed to