Chương 30: “What He Tells Her”

She asked him again on a Friday night, not about before-before this time but about after.

"If the binding broke," she said.

"If I, I don't know, gave you back or something. What would you do?" He sat with the question. She was lying on her bed looking at the ceiling, relaxed, not afraid of the answer. She asked it the way she asked things she was genuinely curious about, without the weight of needing it to come out a particular way. He used to know the answer. He had an answer prepared from the very first day, a plan in seventeen parts that began with breaking the binding and ended with the resumption of his natural order.

He had maintained this plan for weeks. He had refined it. He had occasionally taken it out and looked at it the way you take out something you're keeping for later. He hadn't looked at it in a long time. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. He glowed once. It had started to mean more than yes, she knew this, she read it the way she read all of him.

"You don't know anymore," she said. He didn't glow. He didn't not-glow. He sat there.

"That's okay," she said.

"I don't know what I want to be when I grow up either." She said it completely without irony, which was what made it the truest thing anyone had said to him in a very long time. He sat on the windowsill. He thought: he was something ancient and terrible that had consumed armies. He thought: she was nine years old and she had, without trying, without asking, without any of the methods that things had used against him over three thousand years, entirely rearranged him.

He thought: he did not know what he would do if the binding broke. He thought: he was not sure he would leave. He did not tell her this. She already knew. System: Bond Strength: 81%. Floors Reclaimed: 14 of 31. We've been doing this a long time, Vorrath. Watching you. We watched you unmake things for three thousand years and we watched you decide to and we watched you decide it was inevitable when it wasn't. We've watched all of it. We want to say: this is better. Not easier. Not simpler. Better. That's all.

That's all we wanted to say.