The bell above the door chimed with a frantic urgency as I burst into the apothecary. The transition from the clinical air of the Imperial boulevard to the interior of the shop was a sensory collision. Inside, it smelled of dried valerian, pungent eucalyptus, and the dusty, sweet aroma of ancient paper. The lighting was low and amber, provided by floating glass lanterns that hummed with a soft, magical resonance, casting long, wavering shadows across the floorboards.

  I rushed to the counter, my heels striking the wood with a heavy, desperate rhythm. The woman behind the desk, a middle-aged soul with spectacles perched on the tip of her nose and apron pockets stuffed with dried sprigs, recoiled at first. Her eyes went wide, taking in the sight of a six-foot-one model of a woman in skin-tight black latex, her platinum hair disheveled, appearing in a burst. But the moment her gaze dropped to the bundle in my arms, the fear vanished, replaced by the universal instinct of a healer.

  "Please," I gasped, my smoky voice cracked and raw. "She’s not breathing right. She’s blue."

  The lady didn't ask for papers. She didn't ask for coin. She reached out, her hands warm and smelling of lavender, and guided me toward a small, velvet-topped examination table under a concentrated beam of amber light.

  "Oh, you poor little soul," the apothecary whispered, her fingers deftly uncurling the tattered grey rags.

  We looked at the baby together. In the sharp light, the child looked even worse. Her face was a ghostly, translucent white, her tiny lips and the beds of her fingernails stained a terrifying shade of bruised indigo. Every breath was a violent, rattling struggle, a wet, shallow sound that seemed to tear at the very fabric of the room’s silence.

  "Pneumonia," the woman muttered, her brow furrowing in a deep, worried line. "And the chill of the mountains has taken hold of her blood. We need to clear the fluid."

  She scrambled to the shelves, her hands shaking slightly as she pulled down vials of glowing green liquid and jars of thick, honey-like paste. We tried, with a frantic, heart-breaking focus, to get the medicine into the child. I held her head, my large fingers feeling impossibly clumsy against her fragile skull. Every time the baby let out a weak, agonizingly wet cough, a little part of me broke. It was a visceral, physical pain in my chest, a motherly ache that made my vision blur with unshed tears.

  Stay with me, little universe, I thought, my heart drumming a frantic prayer against my ribs. Just keep breathing.

  The door behind me didn't just open; it exploded inward.

  "TAYLOR!"

  The shout was a jagged, emotional blade that cut through the quiet of the shop. I turned to see Joshua standing in the doorway, his eyes welling with a mix of fury and pure, unadulterated terror. Behind him, Eren and Barnaby were breathless, their faces flushed from running. Alan slipped in last, moving like a shadow but his body twitching madly, his eyes darting toward the shelves of herbs with a strange, predatory hunger that I was too distracted to fully process.

  "HOW COULD YOU!" Joshua’s voice rang out again, no longer the "Bastion" of the party, but a man who had clearly just stared into the abyss. He stomped toward me, his heavy boots echoing on the wood. "You just... you just ran! You vanished into the crowd! Do you have any idea what we went through at the gate?"

  Eren pushed past him, her cat ears pinned flat against her head, her tail lashing in a frenzy of anger. "Barnaby spent half an hour arguing with the guards, Taylor! He was ready to offer them every single coin we had just to find out where they took you! We thought you were gone! We thought they’d 'purified' you!"

  She was flustered, her small hands balled into fists, but as she reached the counter and saw the motionless, blue-lipped baby, her anger evaporated. She stopped mid-sentence, her breath catching in her throat as she looked at the tiny, struggling life I was cradling.

  "So that’s the baby?" Barnaby chimed in, his voice uncharacteristically soft as he removed his hat and stepped closer. "The guards told us you’d gone mad for a refugee child. I see now... just in time, too."

  I looked at them, my friends, my family. They had been ready to bankrupt themselves, to fight the Empire’s legionnaires, just to get me back. The realization of how much they cared for me, not as a weapon, but as a person, hit me with the force of a physical blow.

  "I'm sorry," I whispered, leaning my forehead against the baby’s. "I just... I couldn't leave her."

  "At least tell us next time," Joshua murmured, his hand landing on my shoulder, his grip firm and grounding. "You can't do something so dangerous again. You're the heart of this group, Taylor. If you stop beating, we all die."

  The apothecary lady let out a long, defeated sigh. She stepped back from the table, wiping her hands on her apron, her face etched with a hollow kind of grief.

  "That’s all I can do," she said, her voice trembling. "The potions... they’ve reached their limit. Her lungs are too heavy. The fluid won't clear."

  "Nothing?" I asked, my voice a jagged rasp. "There has to be something else. A higher tier? A spell?"

  The woman shook her head slowly. "Not here. I’ve given her enough to keep her heart beating for a few more hours, but... the blue isn't leaving."

  I scooped the baby back up, pulling her close to my chest, feeling the heat of her fever through the latex of my suit. Please survive, little one. Please.

  Eren jumped up on her tiptoes, trying to see the child’s face. The group softened, huddled around me in a tight circle of shared, helpless grief. At that moment, we were all witnesses to a dying stranger.

  "But seriously," Joshua whispered, his eyes fixed on the baby. "Don't ever scare me like that again."

  Then, the peace of the moment was shattered by a sound I’ll never forget.

  It was a low, animalistic snarl. I turned my head to see Alan. He wasn't the cold, methodical mage I knew. He was a nightmare.

  His eyes were bloodshot, the whites of them stained a sickly, yellowish red. His skin was pale and dry, starting to peel away in flakes around his jawline. He looked like a man who was being eaten from the inside out by his own nerves. He rushed the counter, his movements jerky and erratic, knocking over a display of incense.

  "PERIVAN FLOWER EXTRACT!" Alan screamed, his voice a cracked, horrifying shriek. "NOW! STAT! YOU BETTER HAVE IT, YOU OLD HAG!"

  He slammed his hands onto the wooden counter, his fingers clawing at the surface. He was terrifying. The "gentleman" who had held my hand on the steps was gone, replaced by a drug-addicted hole of a person. His teeth were gritted so hard I could hear the enamel grind.

  The apothecary lady backed away, her hands raised in terror. "We don't have that here! That’s a controlled substance! Only the Silo’s central labs have the Perivan bloom! Please, you’re scaring me! Get out!"

  "ALAN!" Joshua shouted, stepping forward to grab his arm. "Stop it! What are you doing?"

  Alan ignored him. He was in a state of twitchy, drug-induced hysteria. Tears were streaming down his face, carving tracks through the dust on his cheeks. His leg, the one that had been healed, went limp, dragging behind him as he tried to vault over the counter.

  "It’s here!" Alan wailed, his voice breaking into a sob. "The center of the Empire... it has the fix! It has my drugs! Give them to me! I can't feel my hands! Everything is burning!"

  "I'm calling the guards!" the lady screamed, her hand reaching for a brass bell on the wall.

  "We have to go! Now!" Barnaby barked.

  We fled.

  Joshua and Barnaby grabbed Alan, dragging him kicking and screaming through the door as the bell began to chime a frantic alarm. I followed, holding the sickly, blue-lipped baby to my chest with one hand, while the other reached out to steady the crazed, sobbing man who used to be my most reliable friend.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  We reached a small, dark plaza a few blocks away. The stone ground was cold, and the amber light of the Sentinels flickered in the distance, but the square itself was empty and quiet.

  Joshua threw Alan to the ground, pinning his arms behind his back with the practiced strength of a soldier. Alan didn't fight back like a warrior; he thrashed like an animal, his face pressed into the cold cobbles, his voice a muffled, agonizing string of pleas for "the flower."

  "Alan, look at me!" Joshua roared, his voice cracking with his own despair. "Look at what you're doing!"

  Alan just wept, his body shaking with a chemical chill that no fire could warm.

  I stood in the center of the square, the silence of the night pressing in on us. I looked down at the baby in my arms, still blue, still rattling, her life a flickering candle in a hurricane. Then I looked at Alan, the brilliant mind, the clinical strategist and observer, now a broken, peeling wreck on the floor.

  Have you ever watched your friend go crazy in front of you? Have you ever felt the moment when the "game" stops and the permanent, ugly reality of failure begins?

  I felt helpless.

  I looked up at the Obsidian Monolith, towering over us in the dark.

  A dying infant and a crazed friend.

  "What do we do?" Eren whispered, her voice a small, terrified sound in the dark.

  Joshua didn't answer. He just held Alan down, his own head bowed, as the cold wind of Oros began to whistle through the empty streets.

  The night air of Oros was a cold, clinical weight, smelling of sterile, damp stone of the Tier 2 boulevards. We stood in the empty square, a fractured circle of outcasts under the flickering amber hum of a distant Sentinel orb. Joshua held Alan down, his gauntlets pinning the frantic, sobbing man to the cobbles, while Barnaby and Eren stood as a silent, terrified guard. I remained in the center, my 6’1” frame a dark, lustrous silhouette in the moonlight, cradling the tiny, blue-lipped universe of the child against my chest. Every shallow, rattling dying breath the baby took felt like a jagged piece of glass cutting into my own soul.

  Then, the shadows at the mouth of a nearby alley shifted.

  It didn't happen with a flash of light or a thunderous proclamation. Out of the darkness stepped a girl. She looked barely eighteen, her frame delicate and slight, draped in a simple, unadorned robe of white linen that seemed to catch and hold the dim lantern light. But it was her hair that drew the eye, a cascade of spun gold that didn't just reflect the light, but seemed to generate its own. It was a warm, flickering radiance, like a candle guttering in a storm, casting a soft, angelic halo around her features.

  She walked toward us with a quiet, barefooted grace. Her face was a masterpiece of innocence, her hazel eyes wide and filled with a sorrow so ancient it didn't belong on a girl so young. She didn't look at the obsidian-clad goddess or the armored bastion; her gaze went straight to the bundle in my arms.

  She didn't say a word. She simply reached out, her small, slender hands, wrapped in thin, stained bandages, sliding beneath the grey rags I held. I should have pulled away. I should have been wary. But as her skin brushed against mine, I felt a wave of absolute, terrifying peace wash over me. I handed the baby to her.

  The girl cradled the child close to her chest. For a moment, the golden glow of her hair intensified, bleeding into the white linen of her robe. I watched, my mouth agape, as the ghostly, bruised indigo began to recede from the baby’s lips. The wet, rattling struggle in the child’s chest smoothed out into a deep, rhythmic sigh. The fever that had been radiating through my suit vanished. The baby’s skin turned a healthy, petal-pink, and the frantic, dying heartbeat beneath the rags settled into the steady drum of a peaceful sleep.

  The girl smiled, a small, tired curve of her lips, and handed the sleeping child back to me.

  Then, she turned toward the floor.

  Alan was still thrashing, his body racked by the chemical fire of withdrawal, his skin peeling and his eyes a yellowish, bloodshot mess. The girl knelt beside him in the dirt, her white robe staining with the dust of the square. She reached out and took his hand, the hand that had been clawing at the cobbles just seconds before.

  She leaned in close, her golden hair veiling his face. She let out a rough, hacking cough, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of a thousand sicknesses, and looked straight into Alan’s dilated, panicked pupils.

  "Be not afraid," she whispered. Her voice was like the softest silk against stone.

  A visible ripple of light passed from her fingers into his arm. It was visceral. I watched as the sickly pallor left Alan’s face in a heartbeat. The peeling skin seemed to knit back together; the frantic, animalistic tension in his muscles dissolved, replaced by a deep, boneless relaxation. His pupils contracted, returning to their sharp, dark clarity. Most miraculous of all, I saw his leg, the one that had been dragging and limp, flex with a sudden, renewed strength.

  The pain, the hysteria, the addiction, it was simply gone, as if it had never existed.

  The angelic girl stood up slowly, her movements heavy, as if the gravity of the square had suddenly doubled for her. She looked at us, her hazel eyes twinkling with a weary, innocent light.

  "I've got to go," she said, her voice a soft chime. "I'm not supposed to be out at night alone! Bye bye."

  She turned and began to walk back toward the alley. I watched her closely, my lens zooming in on her retreat. She walked with a small, inconceivable limp on her right leg, a shadow of the pain she had just taken from our friend.

  Alan didn't move from the ground. He stayed on his knees, his eyes fixed directly on the spot where she had vanished into the shadows. He looked like a man who had seen the sun for the first time after a lifetime in a cave. He was hooked, not on the herbs, but on the memory of the light.

  "What... what was that?" I blurted out, my voice a smoky, disbelieving rasp.

  Barnaby, who had been standing in a stunned silence, removed his hat and wiped a hand across his brow. He looked at the alley, then back at us, his whimsy replaced by a deep, local reverence.

  "I think that was our guardian angel of Oros," Barnaby quips, his voice low. "Saint Augustine. I’ll tell you more about her later, Taylor. We can't linger here."

  The silence of the square was broken by the rhythmic clang-clang-clang of Imperial armor. I tensed, my motherly instinct flaring as I pulled the baby closer to my chest. Two guards, the same young boys from the VIP room earlier, came huffing and running toward us, their helmets flipped up. Behind them, a lanky man dressed in tattered, mud-stained rags struggled to keep up.

  "There she is!" one of the guards shouted, pointing at me. He stopped in front of us, gasping for air. "You’re lucky the Sentinel system didn't come for you, ma'am! If the orbs had flagged your 'assault' on the apothecary, they would have killed ya straight away. Intent-screening doesn't care about sick babies."

  The guard looked at me, his eyes still holding that smitten, wide-eyed admiration, but then he stepped aside to let the lanky man through.

  "Anyways," the guard continued, "we brought your husband. He came to the office in a panic, saying his wife had left the queue with the baby and gone into a fugue state."

  I froze. My heart hammered against the obsidian latex of my suit. Husband? Wife? I looked at the man in rags. He was gaunt, his face a map of the same Yara Valley misery we had fled. His eyes were wet with tears, but there was a flicker of something else behind them, a frantic, desperate urgency.

  I knew I wasn't his wife. His wife was the woman I had watched die at the gate. The woman whose life had been snuffed out by an amber zap.

  I looked at the baby who was now sleeping peacefully in my arms, her breath a sweet, milky perfume. A part of me, a dark, selfish part of my soul, wanted to scream that he was lying. I wanted to keep her. What was going on in my brain. I couldn't decipher it.

  It’s not even my baby…

  "Is the baby yours?" I asked the man, my voice cold and sharp. "Prove it. Where is the birthmark?"

  The man looked anxious, his hands twisting in the fabric of his tattered tunic. He looked at the guards, then back at me, his voice trembling. "She... she has a mark. Little Cinna. It's on her inner right thigh. A pear-shaped mark, the color of a bruised plum. My wife... she used to kiss it every morning."

  I looked down at the child. Reluctantly, with a hand that felt like lead, I shifted the grey rags. I pulled back the edge of the cloth and looked at the small, chubby inner thigh of the child.

  There it was. A perfect, pear-shaped birthmark.

  I closed my eyes for a second, a hollow, devastating weight opening in my chest. I had gained a daughter and lost her in the span of an hour. The motherly tenderness I had felt, the velvet-soft, milk-scented universe I had cradled, was being torn away by the reality of the world.

  I handed the baby over. I felt the warmth leave my chest as the man took her, clutching the child to his ragged chest and sobbing into her hair. He didn't look at me. He didn't thank me. He just turned and began to walk away, escorted by the guards.

  "Why?" I whispered to the empty square. "Why did I want her so much?" It was strange…

  The inner conflict was a storm. I was a gamer in a body that wasn't mine, in a world that shouldn't be real. Yet the ache of losing that child felt more real. I felt empty, my body feeling like a hollow shell of obsidian and silver, a body just for show.

  "We're all tired," Barnaby said, stepping forward and resting a heavy hand on my arm. "It’s been a day of traveling through the dark. I’ve parked the wagons at a hotel I know nearby. It’s a 'High-Rise' establishment and the owner gave me a discount. Much better for de-stressing than an inn. Let's go."

  We began to walk in the other direction, leaving the gate and the square behind. The city of Oros loomed over us, its glass sky-bridges and obsidian towers shimmering in the moonlight. I reflected on the irony of it all, how I had rushed into the fire for a life that wasn't mine to keep.

  Beside me, Alan was walking with a strange, new confidence. He wasn't scratching his shoulder anymore. He wasn't shaking. His gait was smooth, his eyes bright and focused. But he wasn't looking at the road. He was murmuring to himself, his voice a low, melodic thrum of obsession.

  "She was so beautiful," Alan whispered, his eyes wide and vacant. "The way the light... it didn't just hit her. It came from her. An angel. She took it all. She took the burn."

  He was lovestruck, a clinical mind finally undone by a miracle. He looked at the shadows of every alley we passed, hoping for another glimpse of the white robe and the golden hair.

  I looked at Barnaby as we approached the shimmering glass doors of the hotel, the neon-amber elements of the city's signage reflecting in my eyes.

  "What did you say the Saint's name was again, Barnaby?"