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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