It's a lot easier to recognise the warning signs of a sanctuary starting to fall apart when it's your second time. The more arguments you hear, the more tempers you see flare up, and the more chaos threatens to envelop the Bastion, the clearer it is how weak and shallow its state of order really is.

You still remember the ragtag group of survivors who gave you directions to this so-called safe haven – one of whom shot a creature limp in midair as it leapt for you, mere seconds before its teeth could close around the pulse in your neck, while another dove at your legs so your knees caved and you fell backward, banging your shoulder hard into the stone pedestal of a statue you never got a close look at, but saving you from the splatter of the zomboid's remains as it split open at the wound, blood congealing or already congealed by the time it touched the air.

You remember the way their faces twisted, with confusion or understanding or maybe sympathy, when you told them you had no intention of staying. You thought, then, how naive they were to think their little holdout could promise safety forever.

Now, you think, you had better not make the same mistake.

For a week, you rise with the sun and sleep with it. The muscles in your legs and arms become more prominent, not for lack of flesh surrounding them but because they become more used to failure. Training to failure, wrote the trainer, is as important for your mental endurance as for physical strength. If you can recover from fatigue again and again, you learn over the long term to work through prolonged stress. If you can work through prolonged stress, for an indefinite amount of time, you can give a hand when your community most direly needs you.

Sha-Yalith was his name – a strong back, or less simply, a “Reliable Bearing”. The name, when given to him, was explained thus: someone who could be relied upon to carry the weight of a new world. You don't need to read on to know whose explanation this was.

Your new melee weapon is a curved blade that none of the long-dead writers in your hands can identify. Nor can you find the Relic Seeker, though not for lack of trying – he simply doesn't seem to be anywhere amongst the impassioned whispers of the Bastion, as its members have their private conversations, and in some cases, with shifty looks between them, what seem to be alliances.

Far easier to find is the Archivist, Raul, standing far enough away that they're distinguishable from the crowd. Maybe that's what they want. Raul takes your weapon into both hands to examine it, and you try not to seem too reluctant to part with it. A soldier's sabre, from Luat-na Bonswi, they conclude; but, strangely, bearing the signs of a few hundred years' wear. How it arrived here, they could not guess, except perhaps for the work of ancient raiders – it's a utilitarian item, not a gift that might have been given to a visitor for their far-off mantlepiece. Raul keeps you captive to their stories for a while longer, and for less information, than you would like.

There isn't much space in the Bastion where you can trial the sword without causing damage. You find an overgrown, tent-less part of the perimeter fence to practice slashing at, imagining the weeds grappling the chain-links to be tendons and the tree trunk swollen around the fence-post to be a neck. Wind rustles, through your hair and the leaves, and through them you spot something that gives you pause – the outline of a figure, head and chest, amidst the darkness beyond the fence. You duck for cover, eyeing it warily. It is perfectly, predatorily static, but as moments pass and it doesn't move, you slowly rise from the mud to face it.

A hanging man in the woods, its hands nailed to the tree behind it.

A training dummy, hood thrown over its face to conceal torment it doesn't feel.

You clamber over the fence, over the gnarled roots in the ground, and slash the rope with your sword. Every man is for himself, out here. You know that all too well. If whoever made this dummy wanted to keep it, they should have done a better job of hiding it.

{[]}