A Brief and Entirely Incomplete Guide to Ashenmoor
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Lesser Known Facts About Ashenmoor…
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Common Knowledge About Ashenmoor…
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The Map of Ashenmoor…
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Ashenmoor…
Did you mean:
Ash’n’more (regional barbecue technique)
Ashen-no-More (a constipation remedy)
Ashen Moors (fashionably bleak holiday destination)
Ashenmourne (minor god of misdirection and smoke damage)
A Shenmue (possibly a video game?)
Ashen Boar (local wildlife)
Ass Hen Mo…
…
***
“Oi! Flee somewhere else! I—gasp—I was here first!”
Holding all the persuasive power of a damp leaflet in a thunderstorm, her increasingly wheezy shouts weren’t doing much to discourage Lionel from staying a comfortable two dozen paces ahead of her—close enough that he could see her without being swallowed by the mist, and far enough that the barnacled horrors found her significantly more delectable.
Even if the village had allowed him to flee in a direction of his own choosing, they wouldn’t have.
Lionel was no longer running to get away. He was there to sate an intrinsic need to observe—the kind that glues your eyes to particularly disastrous carriage accidents. Something so horrible that you can’t bring yourself to look away.
The Spectacle.
He’d put thought into that title. It had been The Show, Performance, and even Situation before he decided Spectacle was the only word with enough dignity for something this ridiculous.
The girl had reached that peculiar twilight zone of exhaustion where she could no longer outpace the monsters but hadn’t yet fully collapsed into a heap of regret. This, as Lionel discovered, was when the magic began:
- Snapping maws were avoided by skidding face-first through puddles.
- Jagged hooks, knives, and harpoons passed by thanks to ill-timed, gravity-defying, and pitifully sluggish cartwheels.
- Tail swipes and swinging claws, when they did hit her—and they did—she simply rebounded off the nearest available surface like a particularly squishy rubber ball, springing up again like a damp jack-in-the-box.
And then there was the plushie.
Oh yes, the plushie.
A bedraggled, squelching, over-loved soft toy that, despite all logic and natural law, was being weaponized with a vengeance.
Again and again, deep-sea horrors were introduced to the damp underside of the thing, which seemed to leave emotional scars rather than physical ones. More than once, Lionel swore he saw it cry—and not in the cute “oh no, I’m sad” way, but in the “you don't know what I’ve seen” inherent to veterans of war.
Then he was promptly distracted by the Pink Menace headbutting a shrimp-looking thing with little regards for which was sturdier—its shell or her leather helmet.
A frenzied, eel-like horror managed to clamp her pink hoodie between its teeth.
Unfortunately for the slippery creature, she was slipperier still. She wriggled free like a marsupial, delivered a sharp kick to a place that all biology—land or sea—agreed was best left un-kicked, and shouted something indignant about kleptomaniacs.
With fluid grace, she scooped the hoodie into her arms, wriggled back inside, and legged it.
All of it seemed so chaotically, unreasonably intentional that Lionel—in a brief moment of weakness—was almost fooled into believing she could make it.
Almost.
If she just wasn’t huffing like an overheated dog with pneumonia.
If her arms weren’t dangling at her sides like two very damp, very tired noodles.
If, every time she got hit—and she got hit a lot—her only counterattack was something more than a string of offended yelps and plushie-based violence.
It did beg to question how, exactly, this whirlwind of improbable existence had managed to annihilate his Dungeon.
The answer he settled on: A fluke.
She wasn’t some elite Delver concealing her skills. She wasn’t even a competent Delver. She was a catastrophe that had wandered into the wrong place at exactly the right time, courtesy of a System that had long since given up pretending to make sense.
Watching her get hurled through yet another shed—courtesy of a slug-troll—Lionel winced.
He had, until now, been quietly expecting her to drop the act, reveal her hidden powers, and unleash an awe-inspiring display of Delver prowess—the kind which involved leaping off rooftops, cleaving monsters in half with a flick of the wrist, and made you actually deserving of delivering pithy one-liners in midair.
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Instead, her crowning achievement thus far had been whacking that same slug-troll with a broken fishing rod. Repeatedly.
To be fair, this had caused the troll to lash out with enough anger to kill two gilled horrors in the process. But as tactical masterstrokes went, it had all the hallmarks of someone tripping over a winning lottery ticket.
Any benefit from this accidental triumph was swiftly undone when, in the ensuing moment of surprise, the girl was scooped up by an oversized claw and was launched through the air like a screaming, pink javelin—the kind that tended to explode through wooden sheds, leaving behind more splinters than dignity.
Lionel sighed, rubbed his face, and muttered to himself, “What am I even doing?”
He watched her stagger out of the rubble, swinging her increasingly tragic plushie around like a flail while shouting what sounded like profanities.
They probably were profanities, although Lionel had doubts about whom, exactly, “I’ve eaten expired salmon rolls that hit me harder than that!” was meant to insult.
The troll? The salmon rolls? Herself? Possibly all three.
Watching her get batted around like an unusually noisy shuttlecock wasn’t nearly as satisfying as he’d expected. In fact, it was edging dangerously close to something resembling pity.
“You don’t care,” he reminded himself as she narrowly avoided becoming one with a very large, very sharp anchor for the third time. “She’s the reason you’re here. The reason your plans are in ruins. The reason you’re about five minutes away from being eaten by something with more teeth than sense…”
And yet, as the anchor was hauled back for a fourth swing—this time with twice the enthusiasm—Lionel cursed under his breath, regretted his life, and ran.
Not away this time.
No, he was running straight toward the pink, screaming headache he’d been so desperate to leave behind.
***
Annabell was having a terrible time.
It wasn’t just the swarm of fish-smelling things trying to get the better of her—though, objectively, they weren’t helping. Nor was it the rain or the mud, although they were certainly putting in a solid effort.
No, the real kicker was the naps she was missing out on. Three, by her last count. Possibly four. Annabell’s sense of time had been bludgeoned into submission about two monsters ago, so there might have been a fifth nap in there somewhere, lurking unseen.
Either way, she was long overdue for all of them, and her blood sugar had officially flipped from Contentedly Grazing Cow to Cranky Gremlin on the Verge of Homicide.
Her energy reserves were gone.
Utterly depleted.
She hadn’t done this much exercise in years, and it was killing her.
Literally.
Well, “literally” in the sense that harpoons jabbing at one’s face could be considered a form of aggressive cardio. Without them, she would’ve happily plopped herself down, pulled her hood over her head, and declared this day—night—whatever—the universal equivalent of “Done.”
“Dang it, Wallace!” she wheezed, swinging the bulldog plushie with all the strength she could muster. Which, frankly, wasn’t much. “Put your back into it!”
Wallace responded with a rather damp squelch as he connected with a fish man’s face, which seemed to offend the creature more than it hurt it.
There came a bubbling hiss—half anger, half confusion—and Annabell met the retaliatory fin swipe in the only way she had energy left for: shoving Wallace in front of her like a shield.
“Stop complaining, Wallace! You’re not even—”
The thing about using a plushie as a shield, of course, is that it’s a plushie. They are, as a general rule, designed for hugging, not for intercepting claws the size of doors.
Case in point: as the rampaging slug-troll’s more seafood-flavored limb came swinging once more, it cleaved through the fish man lunging for Annabell, straight through Wallace, and kept going as if both were made of slightly damp paper.
With a breathless “bukyah!”—a noise that linguists agree has no known translation—Annabell was sent pinwheeling backwards through the mud.
More awkward was her landing. Not because it hurt (which it did), but awkward because she came to rest directly at the boots of Always-There-At-Annoying-Times-Lionel.
“What—cough—what are you still doing here?” she sniffled valiantly, wiping her nose in the universal manner of someone determined not to look like the universe was kicking them down.
“Making a mistake,” he flatly replied, grabbing her by both bunny ears.
“Hey! What do you think you’re—”
Before she could finish, Lionel had yanked her bodily out of the way as a very large, very unfriendly anchor slammed into the ground where she’d just been lying.
The resounding CLANG was loud enough to make the mud shiver.
From behind the anchor, two shark-toothed… things darted out, launching themselves forward like carnivorous torpedoes.
Lionel switched his grip. One moment Annabell was a problem on the ground, the next she was dangling by the front of her hoodie as he sidestepped the rabid things.
The first shark-toothed torpedo missed him entirely. The second didn’t, but Lionel redirected it with the flat of his hand, the way a man might shoo away an inconveniently large pigeon. Neither event slowed him down.
And so, before a roaring anchor could come swinging their way once more, he ran—Annabell tucked under his arm like a disgruntled floor mat.
Annabell, naturally, was split on this matter.
On one hand, Gremlins are hardwired to conserve energy, even when it involves being transported in ways that would mortify most sentient beings.
Yes, it was undignified.
Yes, it was uncomfortable.
Yes, she could practically hear her pride packing its bags and leaving.
But it was also infinitely easier than using her own legs, which, frankly, had declared a general strike several minutes ago.
And so, it took Annabell twenty full seconds to make up her mind. Twenty seconds, five buildings, three slammed doors, and one sagging window that Lionel vaulted through with the kind of infuriating grace she couldn’t replicate even by accident.
By the time she decided—firmly—that she did not like this mode of transport, Lionel had already carried her a significant distance from their pursuers.
“Let me down!” Annabell spat, twisting in his grip like a cat who had remembered, mid-snuggle, that it was technically a wild animal.
Lionel obliged.
She hit the mud with a splash.
Rather than fuss about it, Annabell bounced back to her feet and gave her front a few swipes in the vague hope of restoring some non-existing decorum.
The result was less “dignified” and more “additional streaks of mud,” which, to be fair, didn’t clash much with her overall aesthetic.
“Thank you kindly,” she huffed, voice dripping with sarcasm thick enough to drown a small rodent.
Lionel shrugged and set off at a brisk pace—eyes sweeping their misty surroundings all the while.
“Unless you want to keep being treated like a squeaky toy in a kobold kennel,” he said over his shoulder, still walking, “I suggest you start using those legs for something other than decoration. Because—”
He paused. Long enough to stare at the building ahead of them in disbelief—the one that really shouldn’t have been there—but not long enough for Annabell to chime in with some retort.
“This place really is looping on itself like a bad memory…” With a click of his tongue, he continued toward the building up ahead.
“This way,” he said. “And do try not to break the wall with your face this time. I’m not entirely sure how many more attempts we get at this before the entire place decides we’re done.”
Annabell, suffering from an all-time energy low, couldn’t even bring herself to be obtuse.
She just gave a quiet, “No you,” nodded with satisfaction, and waddled after him with low-spirited steps.
Not following, of course, but merely walking in the same direction because the structure ahead seemed as good as place for a nap as any: a weathered building that, unlike the dozen near identical sheds they’d already passed, looked like it had once been a home.
A home for something that was starting to remember.