Chương 39: “What He Builds”

He reclaimed five floors in one week. Partway through the third one, there was the thing he noticed that made him stop and sit in the dark of the dungeon for a while. He was not forcing them. He had always reclaimed floors by force, tearing the dormancy out, breaking the seal, imposing his will on the space the exact way he had imposed his will on everything for three thousand years. It worked. It cost him. It left the floors functional but raw, the edges sharp in ways that took time to smooth.

These five floors were different. He went down and the floors opened. Like a house unlocking when someone came home. Like the dungeon, his dungeon, the extension of himself that he had been slowly waking up, recognized something in him that it didn't recognize before and decided he could come in. He walked through the fifteenth floor, which should have been collapsed, which he had been dreading, and it was not collapsed.

It was dim and worn and old but it was whole, the passages intact, the rooms in the places he had put them, everything waiting. He reclaimed it in an hour. The sixteenth in two. By the end of the week he had nineteen floors and he was moving differently through himself too, and not like some army general taking new territory, but more like something returning to a place it originally came from. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

He built a room on the fourteenth floor. Not only did he build the rooms, he designed every part of them, he engineered them, precision and intent and no wasted space. But this room was built from something else. It had the same soft angles as Gerald's floor. A window, which looked into the wall on the other side, which was dark, but it was a window. A place to sit. A temperature that stayed warm without being asked. He did not know who it was for. He suspected he knew who it was for. He went back upstairs.

June was doing her homework. She looked up.

"You've been down there a lot this week." Two glows.

"Is it good down there now?" One glow. She looked at him a moment.

"Will you show me someday?" He had not thought about this. He thought about it now. A child in his dungeon. In the actual dungeon, the floors, the rooms. Gerald's floor and the guardian on the ninth and the memory on the second that he had still not fully resolved. He glowed once. She smiled and went back to her homework. He sat on the windowsill and thought about what it would mean to show her.

He thought about the room on the fourteenth floor with its window into darkness and its warmth that stayed without asking. He thought about who he had built it for. He thought: yes. That was who he had built it for.