The Dead Man's Glyph
The morgue smelled of formalin and stale coffee. Elara Voss pulled on her gloves, the latex snapping against her wrists. At 3 a.m., the only light came from humming refrigeration units, casting long blue shadows across the tile. She had five bodies to process before dawn, and none of them would cry for themselves.
The night clerk wheeled in the latest arrival, a man in his thirties with no ID and a spiral-shaped burn on his left palm. "Found him in an alley off Mercer," the clerk muttered, avoiding her eyes. Elara signed the clipboard and watched him retreat. The mark made her skin prickle.
She positioned the body under the overhead light. The burn was fresh, still red and weeping, but not from any flame she recognized. It seemed to hum under her gaze. Her own grief, a cold stone since her brother died last winter, shifted in her chest.
She reached for the man's wrist to check for rigor, and her thumb brushed the glyph's edge. Ice water shot through her veins. A translucent blue panel flashed before her eyes, filled with unreadable text, then vanished. Elara staggered back, knocking a tray of instruments to the floor. "What the hell?" she whispered.
She pressed her palms to her temples. The panel didn't return. After a long minute, she blamed exhaustion, grief, chemical fumes. She picked up the fallen tray, hands shaking. The glyph on the dead man's palm had stopped weeping and looked darker now, as if it had drunk something from her.
Elara forced herself to finish the paperwork, though her mind replayed the flash. When she turned to log the body, the morgue computer flickered, then displayed: "Grief Engine initialized. User: [REDACTED]. Level: 1. Sorrow reserves: 2/100." She blinked, and the screen returned to normal. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears.
She typed frantically, but nothing happened. A small teardrop icon appeared in her vision's corner, glowing blue. She reached for it, and a skill list unfolded: "Weeping Blade (Locked): Requires 5 sorrow reserves. Convert a tear into a cutting edge." She had two. She needed to cry more.
Elara sat down hard on the cold floor. She hadn't cried in months, not since the funeral. The grief was a knot behind her ribs, locked away. Now the system wanted it open. She thought of her brother's laugh, the way he'd call her 'El', and her eyes burned; the teardrop icon pulsed, and the number ticked up: 3/100.
Before she could process it, a heavy knock echoed through the morgue's steel door. The clock read 3:47 a.m. No one else was scheduled. Elara scrambled to her feet, the blue icon still hovering. The dead man's glyph glowed faintly as the knock came again, harder, and a voice outside said, 'Open up, Miss Voss. We know what you touched.'
The First Tear
Her palm still pressed to the dead man’s glyph, Elara felt the skin beneath her fingers warm, then scorch. Golden lines crawled from the carved symbol up her wrist, burrowing under her sleeve like living thread. She yanked back with a gasp, but the light had already vanished into her flesh. A translucent blue panel flickered in the air before her eyes, humming with a low vibration she felt in her teeth.
She stumbled backward, knocking a steel tray of scalpels to the floor. The clatter echoed off the morgue’s tile walls. The panel resolved into crisp text: “Sorrow Engine initialized. Host: Elara Voss. Current Sorrow reserve: 12.” She blinked, tried to wave it away, but the screen stayed, transparent yet solid as glass.
A hot tear slid down her cheek—shock, not grief—and a soft chime rang out. The panel flickered: “Sorrow +1. Reserve: 13.” She froze. Another tear fought loose. This time she wiped it with her sleeve, but the number ticked again. Every tear. Every single tear was a stat point.
She looked back at the corpse. The glyph was gone from his palm, leaving only a faint scar like an old burn. John Doe, the intake file said. Found in an alley, no ID, no next of kin. She had felt nothing for him an hour ago. Now a cold dread coiled in her stomach, pressing against her ribcage.
She thought the word ‘close’ and the panel vanished. Relief washed over her, then she thought ‘status’ and it reappeared, identical. She could control it. The panel listed categories: Level, Sorrow, Skills, Traits. Under Skills, two locked entries glowed faintly: “Mourning Blade (requires 20 Sorrow)” and “Lament Shield (requires 50 Sorrow).”
Thirteen Sorrow. Not enough for even the blade. She thought of her mother, dead eleven months, cancer eating her from the inside. The dull ache in Elara’s chest sharpened into a knife’s edge. Another tear fell. +1. Fourteen. She could farm her own grief. The realization tasted like copper in her mouth.
She shook her head, hard. This was insane. A video game interface in a morgue, powered by crying. She reached for her phone on the counter, but the panel flashed red: “Warning: unauthorized Sorrow Harvest detected within 100 meters.” Her fingers stopped an inch from the screen.
She moved to the window, parted the blinds with two fingers. The parking lot outside was empty except for her rusted sedan and a black van she had never seen. Its engine idled, exhaust curling in the cold air. A man in a dark overcoat leaned against the driver’s door, staring straight at the morgue’s entrance.
She ducked back, heart slamming against her sternum. The panel now showed a minimap—a pulsing red dot moving from the van toward the building. Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside, heavy and deliberate, each step a countdown. She glanced at the dropped scalpel, its blade glinting under the overhead light.
She lunged for the scalpel, but before her fingers closed on it, the panel flashed: “Hostile Harvest detected. Sorrow siphon initiated. Reserve draining: 14…13…12…” The morgue door swung open. A figure filled the threshold, backlit by the hallway’s fluorescents. The panel identified him: “Collector identified: Novice Rank.” Then a voice, smooth as oil: “Miss Voss. I believe you have something that belongs to us.”
The Collections Agent
She scrubbed at her cheeks with the back of a gloved hand, but the wetness kept coming. The morgue's fluorescent light buzzed overhead, casting the dead man's face in harsh blue. A translucent window flickered in her peripheral vision: SORROW SPIKE DETECTED. Elara swiped at it, but it merely dissolved and reformed closer to the corpse.
The glyph on the dead man's palm pulsed once, faint as a heartbeat. Elara stumbled back, her hip striking the steel table. A new line scrolled across the window: LOCAL HARVESTER DISPATCHED. Her breath came shallow. She had to hide this, had to pretend she was still numb.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. Not the slow shuffle of the night janitor. These were deliberate, sharp, like someone counting steps. Elara grabbed a rag and wiped the dead man's palm, smearing the glyph with disinfectant. The window dimmed but did not vanish.
The door swung open without a knock. A woman in a rain-spotted trench coat stepped inside, water beading on her shoulders. Her hair was slicked back, and her smile was too wide for the room. She held no umbrella, no visitor's badge. "Evening, mortician," she said, voice like cold syrup.
Elara forced her hands steady. "Morgue's closed. You shouldn't be here." The woman's gaze slid past her, not to the corpse, but to the flickering window. She saw it. Elara's chest tightened. "You see it, don't you? The feed."
The woman stepped closer, boots squelching on the linoleum. "Name's Mara. I'm with Collections." She tapped her own wrist, where a tiny glyph, identical to the dead man's, glowed under her skin. "You tripped the sensor with that first tear. Rookie mistake." Her smile widened. "But lucky for you, I'm not here to hurt you. Yet."
Elara grabbed the nearest tool—a bone saw left on the tray—and held it between them. "Stay back." The system window flashed red: COMBAT MODE NOT AVAILABLE. TEARS REQUIRED: 1. She had one tear? No, she had shed more than one. But the counter stayed at zero. She hadn't banked them.
Mara laughed, a short bark. "You think that saw scares me? I've gutted grief farms from here to the harbor." She reached into her coat and produced a small glass vial, empty, with a silver cap. "You're worth more than you know, Voss. That dead man? He was bait. And you swallowed the hook."
The vial caught the light, and for a second Elara saw her own reflection distorted, eyes red and swollen. The system window changed: HARVESTER OFFER: 10 SORROW UNITS FOR ACCESS TO ORIGIN TRAUMA. DECLINE ACCEPT. Her finger twitched over the words, but she didn't choose. She would not choose.
Mara uncapped the vial. "We don't need your consent, sweetheart." She took another step, and the room grew colder, as if the air itself was being drained. Elara's next breath came out as fog. The dead man's hand twitched on the table, fingers curling around the glyph. The system whispered a new line: FAMILIAR PROTOCOL INITIATED. Something was waking.