The night was cold and dark. I know, very basic descriptors for such a thing, but until you’ve spent the night outside in a high alpine forest you won’t really know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t just the sort of cold you’d expect from an average refrigerator, it was the kind of cold that grew icicles in beards and froze breath as it came through your teeth. Arctic cold, it was. And the dark… Have you ever went into a back room with no windows or doors at night and closed everything behind you so its as black as can possibly be in there? Imagine that but even darker, the kind of dark you’d expect flailing tentacles to come bubbling out of, surrounding you on all sides like a heavy blanket of umbrous silk.

  Not to mention that when the campfire finally went out completely, those midnight tears began trailing down my face again leaving red-hot paths down my cheeks. Blinking only made things worse, so I resolved to blink as little as possible.

  Unfortunately, though, the human body has to blink at least some in order to keep the eyes damp enough not to shrivel up into raisins. So after a couple minutes of holding my eyes open I was forced to blink, and I couldn’t stop. The tears burned, causing me to blink more, causing the tears to burn more—it became a vicious cycle that only stopped when I regained a normal blinking pattern about five minutes later.

  Thankfully no creatures decided to attack the camp during those five minutes, though I was forced to take out a couple bats that decided drinking sleeping humans’ blood would be a good idea only a few minutes later. They weren’t particularly difficult opponents, though it quickly became annoying to deal with them when they used some kind of blood-boosted skill of sorts. Why did it feel like everybody had skills on this level except me?

  Time passed slowly. Minutes stretched to centuries in the space of hours, and hours stretched to millennia in the space of days. Does that make any sense? I sure hope not, because time made no sense back then either. I’m not really sure how long I spent in that limbo, except that when all was said and done, approximately seven hours had passed. And my only marker for those seven hours was the ever shifting and boiling darkness.

  At least my body could handle the cold pretty well. My defense stat was absurdly high for my level, and it showed. I never purpled up, as far as I could tell, and the icicles growing on my beardless chin just… fell off. It was like they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I didn’t blame them; I wouldn’t want anything to do with a big monster who could snap my spine if I didn’t go away either.

  The Tears of the Night bothered me the entire time, as well. It was as if I had buried my face in the back of a porcupine that a mad scientist had sprayed with a very, very painful kind of neurotoxin.

  All of this, plus the need for someone to keep watch, kept me awake the whole night, which rendered Mark’s tender words entirely useless. Though I did get a good amount of healing in, it just wasn’t as much as it could have been if I’d slept some. This was the second night in a row I had gotten no sleep. Not a particularly good sign.

  Something else was bothering me as well, and I wasn’t entirely sure what. There were a good deal of things that should have been bothering me, such as the fact that I was going to have to kill someone, but for some reason I wasn’t worried about that. No, it was something else. Strange.

  I sighed and stood. It was still dark out, though a little less dark than before. I could see clearer in the false-dawn than the vague outlines and roiling shadows of the early hours.

  Taking a walk around the campsite took me into view of a shape huddled against a tree facing away from the tents. I approached carefully, in case it was a monster of some kind, but it was only Angel. She hadn’t heard my approach, and she was sitting there with her head between her knees, shaking. Crying.

  I had been afraid this might be the case.

  Usually, when people have near-death experiences or some other kind of danger, they are just fine afterward. But every so often, they suffer a panic attack or some other kind of stress such as night-terrors or flashbacks. This is usually referred to by the acronym PTSD, or Post Trauma Stress Disorder, though it’s not necessarily a disorder so much as an echo of the past. It is an involuntary fear reaction as an after-effect of a stronger fear earlier in life. People often overestimate how common it is—as its actual numbers range in the high single-digit percentage of serious trauma-related incidents—but here in the dungeon, people faced death daily. It was far more likely to develop such a fear in here, especially if they had the reaction to fear Angel was having.

  But PTSD doesn’t happen overnight. It comes from being allowed to wallow in your miseries for long amounts of time. The problem is, people tend to hide what’s bothering them from others, which leads to lingering effects over time.

  Angel was hiding. She didn’t want anyone to see what was wrong, but the near-death experience had suddenly sharpened life in the dungeon for her. It was like waking up in a darkened room and then immediately being teleported out into the sunlight. It hurt, a lot, and that hurt only got worse until her eyes adjusted, which wouldn’t happen unless her friends knew to help. And it wasn’t just that. There was something else wrong as well—something deeper and better hidden.

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  I leaned there against the tree, watching her. I remembered having these exact feelings before, though not from where. All I knew is that I had run away instead of dealing with them. So I decided to help Angel not make the same mistake I did.

  “Hey,” I said, walking the rest of the way around the tree.

  Angel stopped crying immediately, hurriedly wiping the tears from her eyes before looking up at me. Her cheeks were red and puffy, which was enough proof for anyone to know she’d been crying even if she had managed to hide the tears before they got there.

  “You’re up early,” she said cheerfully, making me wince at her tone, “How was your night?”

  Grunting, I sat down next to her. “Yeah, I am. And it was fine. So, tell me what’s wrong.”

  Angel looked at me like I had grown a third head, not just a second. Not the most uncommon expression when it came to dealing with me, but it was often funny to watch. “What do you mean? I’m perfectly fine. There’s nothing wrong. Why would you think that?”

  “Because I just spent the last five minutes watching you cry. That’s why.”

  Her shoulders slumped in defeat. “You saw that?”

  “Yeah, I did. Want to tell me about it?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  I leaned back against the tree, putting my arms behind my head and going back to my night watch routine of scanning the dimness for any sign of danger. There weren’t likely to be any, as most nocturnal creatures were going back to sleep at this point in time, and most diurnal ones were just waking up. During this transition period, the world was very peaceful. No birds were chirping, no critters shuffling through the brush on their way to wherever they were going. Only silence and the sound of our breathing.

  It was during times like this that I really learned to appreciate life. The smells and sounds, the softness of the grass and the roughness of the bark under my head. It was beautiful. Colors were just fading back into existence, muted but still brighter than the dull gray of the surrounding shadows. The icy air, long since having lost its terrible bite, slowly began to warm as the sun poked its forehead over the invisible horizon.

  “I’ve never seen the dawn in the dungeon before,” I found myself saying, “It’s beautiful. If only we could actually see the sun. That would be the best! Still, it’s only a copy of the sun outside, so it’s not exactly the same. Honestly, I never thought I would miss the outside world, but I’m kinda starting to. Oh well. If my luck holds, I’m probably going to end up back there in the next few levels. Have to get myself cured first, though…”

  I trailed off, lost in thought. Truthfully, I knew a lot about what was held in store for us in the coming levels. But the system seemed insistent in throwing me a series of curve-balls I was entirely unprepared for. It was as if the thing wanted to show me how woefully inexperienced I was in the most painful ways possible. And there were plenty of those.

  “My grandfather used to say that all those who count themselves out before the game’s even begun can never win. At least, that’s what my father always told me. I never knew my grandfather.” It was Angel. She was looking down at her hands, examining the smudges of dirt and blood on them.

  I examined her in turn. Her slumped posture, her defeated expression, it all pointed to a lack of hope. That wasn’t good.

  “Lord Dale was a good man,” I told her, “Smarter than many, wiser than most. You should be proud to be his granddaughter.”

  Her posture never changed. “When did you figure it out?”

  “Your reaction at the mention of the Shadow is what tipped me off. They’re not exactly common knowledge, you know. So I probed you a little to see if you really knew what they were or if you’d only been close enough to the right people to hear about them in passing. And your reaction when I mentioned the Paragons didn’t help your case either. Deflection wasn’t the right tactic there.”

  “So you’re really—”

  “I’m not his son, if that’s what you’re asking. I was telling the truth about that. I do know his son, though. But that was a long time ago and I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “But—”

  “You know, adoption’s a finicky business among the nobility nowadays. There are a bunch of rules and regulations surrounding the process, including the law that the adopted may not be referred to as children of the adopters nor siblings of the heirs in any manner whatsoever. Something to do with inheritance laws or some-such. Honestly, I never really questioned it.

  “So what of you? You grew up with the reputation of Lord Dale hanging over your head the whole time. How did you deal with it?” I shifted slightly, unsuccessfully trying to get a better view of her face.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I see.”

  The silence stretched taut, like a bowstring drawn so far back from the bow the wood might snap. It was broken only by the slight rustling of leaves as the wind stirred in its harness, ready for the day to begin. The false-dawn slowly became true dawn and Helios began his daily race across the sky to chase his sister. Stars faded back into their proper places to watch, and the trees stretched their limbs towards the light. Trees that hid it all, and hid us in turn.

  “I had a brother, once.” Angel said, “He was a wonderful boy, full of life and a happiness that defied all logic. No matter what happened, whether he broke his arm or our cat got hit by a car, he would laugh through it all. It didn’t make sense; it was like his sense of sadness was broken or something. But he was still young, he would grow out of it once the world finally knocked some sense into that noggin of his, or so I thought.

  “But as we grew up, I came to realize that wasn’t true. The world just couldn’t knock him down so far he wouldn’t get back up and laugh. Even when his best friend in the whole world got sick and died despite having the best medical care the world could offer, he still found something to laugh about in all of that. ‘My friend wouldn’t want me to be sad for him,’ he said, ‘He’d want me to be happy for all the days we had together.’ It just made no sense.

  “He was the one that kept me from collapsing under the pressure of others’ gazes. I mean, every time someone said we were a disgrace to our grandfather’s legacy because we weren’t up to snuff in geography or math, he’d laugh in their face like they had just made the greatest joke he’d ever heard while I’d just sit there and quail under their annoyed gaze.

  “My brother was the strongest person I’d ever met, and I still haven’t met his match to this very day. The great generals that face death every day couldn’t compare to him. And I’m not even sure why.

  “And then he was ripped away from me. It only took an instant, just a single moment of violence and he was gone. I was thirteen at the time, and I’ve never felt so much fear ever since. It was a day of terror that has burned itself into my mind so deeply I can never forget. Not now, not ever.”