Chương 4: “First Floor”

Night. June asleep, one arm hanging off the bed, mouth open. Vorrath on the windowsill. He reached back through the closet. The first floor was not what he remembered. Three thousand years of dormancy had not been kind to it. The stones were damp, the geometry had gone slack, the unique wrongness of angle that had always made his halls unsettling to walk through had softened into something that just felt like a badly built room. He stood in the ruin of his own antechamber and took stock. One room.

The echo of what it used to be. He started reclaiming it. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. But not quickly, he didn't have the strength for quickly. Methodically, stone by stone, angle by angle, pressing his awareness into each damaged piece of his floor the same way you press a wound to stop the bleeding. This was how it had always worked. This was the part he understood. You found what was broken and you fixed it and you went deeper.

He found the memory at the far end of the floor. He pressed his awareness against it and felt the shape of it immediately. It was old, his, something he had looked at a long time ago and decided he didn't need to look at again. He sealed it. He went back upstairs before dawn and sat on the windowsill and watched the sky go gray at the edges and told himself he was monitoring the perimeter. June's alarm went off.

She emerged from under the blanket and looked immediately at the windowsill, the way she had that first morning, to check he was still there. He was still there. She started telling him about her dream. It had a horse in it. He listened to every word.