Day 12 of being a background character. I've started a tally.
Today's main character activities: Zero.
Today's background character activities: Seventeen.
I counted. Waking up in the same narrow bed at the Bent Gear? Background character. Staring at the ceiling for forty-three minutes before admitting consciousness was non-negotiable? Background character. Eating Marta's porridge while she didn't ask about my three-day disappearance? Peak background character energy.
The porridge tasted like cardboard soaked in obligation. I ate it anyway because that's what background characters do. We consume our cardboard and say thank you.
"More?" Marta asked, ladle hovering.
"No. Thank you."
She studied me with the particular intensity of someone who's watched too many people break in small rooms. "You look like shit."
"I feel perfectly adequate."
"Adequate." She set the ladle down. "That's a new one. Usually people say fine."
"I'm exploring my emotional vocabulary."
"Hmm." She turned back to the stove, which was her way of saying she didn't believe me but breakfast service waited for no one's existential crisis.
I left through the kitchen door because the main entrance felt too… prominent. Background characters use service exits. We avoid grand entrances and meaningful departures. We slip between scenes like punctuation.
The Lower Market was already alive with commerce and complaint. Vendors arguing with dawn, customers haggling with reality, everyone performing the daily theater of survival. I walked through it like subtitles. Present but not really part of the action.
"You're late," Supervisor Kellan said when I finally showed up at Central Communications.
"Sorry. I was…" I paused. What was I doing? Having an existential crisis about whether I created reality or just had a very specific mental breakdown? Counting ceiling cracks and ranking them by how much they looked like my emotional state? "Traffic."
"Traffic." Kellan's expression suggested he knew there was no traffic in the Lower Market at dawn. "Right. Well, now that you've graced us with your presence, here's your route for today."
He handed me a stack of message cylinders. I weighed them in my hands. Physical proof that I had a function. That I could move information from one location to another without accidentally creating or destroying any fundamental aspects of reality.
"Thanks," I said, clipping them to my satchel.
"Philistine?"
"Yeah?"
"You feeling alright? You've been… different since you got back."
Different. That was one way to put it. Another way would be "completely unmoored from any sense of purpose or identity," but that seemed like oversharing. A third way would be "practicing for my new career as furniture," but that was probably too honest.
"I'm fine," I said. "Just tired."
"You sure? Because Thompson's been asking about you. Says you used to ask all these questions about the zones, about how things worked. Now you just…" He gestured vaguely at all of me. "Deliver messages."
"That's literally my job."
"Yeah, but you used to do it like you were going somewhere. Now you do it like you're already there and disappointed about it."
I stared at him. When did Kellan develop observational skills?
"I'm fine," I repeated.
He nodded like he didn't believe me but wasn't paid enough to care. "Get moving. These won't deliver themselves."
"Wouldn't that be something though? Self-delivering messages. Cut out the middle man entirely. Peak efficiency."
"August."
"Moving. I'm moving."
I left Central Communications and started my route. First stop: baker on Third Tier. Message probably about flour prices or oven repairs. Nothing world-changing. Nothing that would prove I was secretly important to the narrative structure of reality. Just correspondence about bread.
The morning air tasted like possibility that had nothing to do with me. I walked through streets I'd memorized without meaning to, past buildings that stood there whether I noticed them or not. The city operated on its own logic, its own rhythm, its own complete indifference to my crisis of authorship.
"Morning, August!" called Henrick from his fruit stand. "Haven't seen you in a few days!"
"I was…" I paused again. On a quest to save someone who didn't want to be saved? Having my entire worldview gently but firmly demolished by a man held together by philosophy and blood loss? Discovering that claiming to have written reality into existence was apparently a symptom rather than an explanation? "Sick."
"Ah, something going around. My cousin had it too. Kept mumbling about the walls having opinions."
I stopped walking. "The walls having opinions?"
"Yeah, weird fever. But he's better now. The walls stopped talking and everything."
"What did they say? The walls?"
Henrick scratched his head. "Something about structural integrity being more philosophical than people assumed. And that load-bearing wasn't just about weight. Fever talk, you know?"
I nodded slowly and kept walking. Even the background characters were having more interesting problems than me. Their walls had opinions. My walls just had cracks that looked like disappointment.
The baker accepted his message with a grunt. He was covered in flour like someone had tried to turn him into bread and given up halfway through. I wondered if he ever thought about the metaphysical implications of yeast. Probably not. Probably he just made bread and went home and didn't lie awake wondering if he'd authored his own irrelevance.
"Sign here," I said.
He signed. We didn't make eye contact. The transaction completed itself while we stood in the same space pretending to be in different stories.
The Academic District was next. Three deliveries to professors who studied things that made sense. Mathematics. History. Languages that existed before someone claimed to have written them. I climbed the marble steps of the Natural Philosophy building and tried not to think about Arthur bleeding philosophy in a courtyard.
Professor Marens answered her door holding a teacup that rattled against its saucer. "Oh. Messages. Yes. One moment."
She set the tea down and signed for her correspondence with hands that shook slightly. I noticed she had charts pinned to every visible wall. Charts tracking something. Patterns maybe. Or the complete absence of patterns.
"Fascinating work," I said, because apparently I couldn't help myself.
"What? Oh. Yes. I'm tracking micro-fluctuations in the ambient philosophical density. There've been… anomalies."
"Anomalies?"
"Spikes. Drops. Moments where the fundamental certainty of things seems to…" She waved her hand vaguely. "Waver. But I'm sure it's just measurement error. Reality doesn't actually fluctuate. That would be absurd."
"Right. Absurd."
She looked at me sharply. "You wouldn't happen to know anything about philosophical density variations, would you?"
"I deliver messages."
"Of course. Of course you do." She closed the door, but I heard her muttering through it. "Twenty-three percent variance in sector seven. That can't be right. Nothing varies twenty-three percent without cause…"
I left the Academic District feeling both vindicated and more lost. Other people were noticing things. The walls were sharing opinions. Reality was showing measurement errors. But what did any of that mean if I was just a message runner who'd had a very specific breakdown?
The merchant in the Guild Quarter tipped me two coppers without looking up from her ledger. Standard. Mundane. Exactly what you'd expect from someone who wasn't the protagonist of anything. I pocketed the coins and wondered if they'd still exist if I stopped believing in currency.
Probably. That was the thing about being a background character. The world didn't need your belief. It just needed you to move messages from point A to point B without having opinions about the nature of points.
I stopped for lunch at a small café that served soup I couldn't identify and bread that was definitely bread-adjacent. The other patrons talked about normal things: work, weather, whether the protective wards needed reinforcement before winter. Nobody discussed the nature of reality or whether they'd been authored into existence.
"You're that message runner," the server said as she refilled my water. "The one who asks all the questions about the Disputed Zones."
"Not anymore," I said.
"Oh? Find what you were looking for?"
I laughed. It came out wrong, like someone had tried to translate humor into a language that didn't have words for joy. "Yeah. Turns out I was looking for therapy."
She gave me the concerned smile of someone who didn't get paid enough for emotional labor and moved on to the next table.
I spent the rest of lunch developing a new classification system for the other patrons:
- The businessman reading contracts: Definitely a supporting character. Had dialogue and everything.
- The old woman feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons through the window: Background character with potential for upgrade if the pigeons turned out to be significant.
- The young couple arguing about paint colors: NPCs. They'd been having the same conversation for three days.
- Me: Background character, subcategory "formerly delusional," special skill "reliable message delivery."
The afternoon deliveries took me to the Lower Banks, where the buildings leaned against each other like drunks sharing secrets. The air smelled like low tide and lost opportunities. I delivered invoices to people who counted coins like they were keeping score in a game nobody won.
"You're August, right?" A woman at a shipping office squinted at me. "You used to work with that scholar. The one studying zone anomalies."
"I deliver messages."
"But you used to…"
"I deliver messages," I repeated, which was both true and a complete surrender to the smallness of truth.
She shrugged and signed for her invoice. I left before she could ask more questions about the person I used to be when I thought I mattered.
By the time I made it back to Central Communications, the sun was setting in that dramatic way that used to make me think about story structure and now just reminded me I needed to buy lamp oil. The sky bled orange and purple like it was trying to tell me something. I ignored it. Sunsets weren't messages. They were just atmospheric phenomena that happened regardless of whether anyone was watching.
"All deliveries complete?" Kellan asked.
"All delivered. No adventures, no revelations, no character development. Just successful mail distribution."
He frowned. "Are you sure you're alright?"
"I'm exactly as alright as a well-functioning background character should be."
"I don't know what that means."
"Neither do I, but I'm committed to the bit."
"…Okay then. Same time tomorrow?"
"Wouldn't miss it. Background characters are very reliable. We're like furniture but with legs."
I left before he could respond to that. The walk back to the Bent Gear was peaceful, uneventful, completely devoid of meaning. Perfect. I counted my steps just to have something to count. Three hundred and forty-seven. Tomorrow it might be three hundred and forty-eight if I took a slightly wider turn at the bakery. The variety was almost overwhelming.
Marta was in the kitchen when I arrived, stirring something that smelled like stew but looked like regret.
"You're walking funny," she observed without looking up.
"Am I?"
"Like someone carrying weight they don't know how to put down."
I stopped in the doorway. "That's very poetic for stew commentary."
"I've been running this place for twenty years. You learn to read people." She finally looked at me. "Whatever happened out there, whatever you found or didn't find, you need to make peace with it."
"What if I can't?"
"Then you fake it until your back stops hurting." She ladled stew into a bowl. "Eat. Background characters need nutrition too."
I stared at her. "I never said…"
"You've been muttering about character significance for three days. Either you're having a creative breakdown or you've discovered something about the nature of reality that broke your brain." She pushed the bowl toward me. "Either way, stew helps."
I sat down and ate while Marta went about her evening routine. The stew was actually good, which felt like a personal betrayal. Background characters should have mediocre stew. This had flavor and complexity and vegetables that might have been fresh yesterday.
"Why is this good?" I asked.
"Because I'm not a background character. I'm a cook. And cooks make good food regardless of who's eating it."
"That's… actually profound."
"No, it's practical. Eat your carrots."
I ate my carrots and wondered when vegetables had become a form of therapy.
"The communication device in your room," Marta said casually while washing dishes. "The one that's been blinking. You planning to answer it?"
"It's not…" I paused. "How do you know about that?"
"I clean the rooms, August. It's been flashing for days. Very insistent little thing. Like a lighthouse for very small, very lost ships."
The device Lyka gave me. I'd shoved it in a drawer and tried to forget about it. Apparently it had other ideas about being forgotten.
"Maybe tomorrow," I said.
"That's what you said yesterday."
"Was it? I don't remember."
"And the day before that."
"Consistency is important for background characters."
"Hmm." Marta's tone suggested she knew exactly how much I remembered and how much I was pretending to forget. "Well, when you're ready to stop pretending you're furniture, it'll still be there."
"Furniture doesn't have existential crises."
"You'd be surprised. I had a wardrobe once that was deeply conflicted about its purpose. Kept trying to be a bookshelf."
I looked at her. She continued washing dishes with perfect serenity.
"You're mocking me," I said.
"I'm making a point. Even furniture can change function if it wants to badly enough."
"But what if it was never furniture to begin with? What if it just thought it was furniture because it misunderstood its place in the room?"
She handed me a dish to dry. "Then it learned something about itself. That's not failure. That's education."
We finished the dishes in companionable silence. I went upstairs thinking about wardrobes that wanted to be bookshelves and what that might mean for someone who'd thought they were an author but turned out to be barely a character.
My room was exactly as I'd left it: small, cramped, and completely unsuitable for someone who'd thought they were writing reality. The communication device was indeed blinking from inside the drawer, casting little shadows that seemed judgmental. I sat on the bed and watched the light leak around the edges. Morse code for "answer me." Semaphore for "you can't hide forever."
I pulled out my journal instead. Time for the daily tally.
Times I Thought About Contacting Arthur: 14
Times I Actually Tried: 0
Times I Wrote Letters I'll Never Send: 3
Times I Considered That Maybe I'm Just Crazy: 47
Times I Wished I Was The Main Character: All of them
Times The Walls Shared Opinions: 0 (walls here are frustratingly quiet)
Times I Wondered If This Tally System Is A Cry For Help: 7
Times I Decided To Keep Tallying Anyway: 7
I closed the journal and lay back on the narrow bed. Tomorrow I'd deliver more messages. Maybe I'd finally answer Lyka's device. Maybe I'd visit Maya and pretend everything was normal. Maybe I'd accept that being a background character wasn't that bad.
Or maybe I'd spend another day tallying all the ways I wasn't special while the world continued its story without me.
I was getting pretty good at maybe.
Outside my window, Edgeharbor hummed with the business of existing. Somewhere out there, Arthur was probably saving people or breaking reality or whatever it was he did when he wasn't gently suggesting I needed professional help. Somewhere out there, stories were happening.
Just not to me.
And that was fine.
(It wasn't fine.)
But I was getting better at pretending.
(I wasn't.)
Character development.
(Please stop.)
The communication device blinked on. Persistent little bastard. I turned my back to the drawer and practiced being furniture. Tomorrow I'd have to buy lamp oil. That was the kind of small, manageable goal that background characters could achieve without accidentally unmaking reality.
Progress.