Chương 27: “The Ninth Floor”

He found the first of them on the ninth floor. He'd been working his way down systematically since the letter, pushing further each night, reclaiming what he could, pushing the radius of himself outward and deeper. The ninth floor had been his first real fortress level. Guard rooms. A gatehouse. The architecture of something that had decided to take itself seriously. And in the first guard room, sitting against the wall with its knees up and its enormous head down, was something large and old and sleeping.

A dungeon guardian. His. He had made it himself, a very long time ago, and he had been proud of it, proud of a thing that works exactly as intended, that has no softness in it, that will do what it was made to do without complication. It woke up when he arrived. It looked at him. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. He looked at it. It was exactly what he made it. No softness. Neither complication.

Only the pure architecture of something designed to destroy anything that entered without permission. He looked at it for a long time. He thought about what it was like to make something with no softness in it and consider that a success. He woke it fully. It stood. It was very large. He gave it its orders and it received them and he went back upstairs. He sat on the windowsill. June was asleep.

She had fallen asleep with her arm around the spare pillow the way she sometimes did, and Gerald had settled in the wall just behind the headboard where it was warmest and Vorrath could feel him in there, patient and contented. He looked at the guardian he had made and he looked at Gerald and he looked at June's drawing on the wall and he thought about the word chose and the young man by the fire on the second floor. He did not sleep. He had not slept in three thousand years.

He sat on the windowsill until morning and for the first time in a very long time the sitting felt different to the waiting. System: Bond Strength: 71%. Floors Reclaimed: 11 of 31. Guardian: Active. Gerald: Still in the wall. He's been there six hours. He's fine. He's happy. That's just Gerald now.