Chương 70: “Down”

He did. He took her hand. This should not have been possible. He had never had hands in this form, in this year of windowsills and pencil cases and water glasses. He was a shard of dungeon core, purple-dark and small. But June put her hand out in the dark of the tenth floor passage and something in him that had been learning for twelve months how to be held, how to be the thing someone reached for, simply knew what to do. She felt him. She took hold of it and they went down.

Behind them Cecile and Lauren did not follow. He felt them stop at the edge of the threshold, the space between the house and the dungeon, the space they had built together over three thousand years from opposite sides, and they stopped there and did not come further and Cecile said something very quiet that he could not hear and did not need to. He took June through the floors. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

He brought her down to the twelfth, and she moved with him the way she had always moved with whatever she had decided to trust, which was completely and without hesitation and in a way that made him feel the weight of it every time.

And as they went deeper through the passage, so did the Ledger press down behind each floor, and Vorrath thought he could sometimes hear its voice reaching through the walls of his own awareness, not necessarily close, but everywhere at once: We have been a long time finding this place, Vorrath, dungeon core, it said. You cannot win. Why, then, persist? Why not face that which is inevitable? The floor behind them collapsed.

He tore it loose from the dungeon's sequence and brought the ceiling down in a controlled fall that was only controlled in the sense that he had meant to do it, which was not the same as having planned it. The cost was immediate. He felt it the way you feel the loss of something structural, the sensation of a floor he had rebuilt stone by stone over three months becoming rubble in four seconds. Still, he kept moving. The Ledger did not bother with the rubble.

It came through the wall instead, unhurried, finding the lower ground. He brought the next stairwell down behind them. It came through that wall too. Everything he broke, it simply went around. Every floor he spent bought seconds, and the seconds were not enough, but he spent them anyway. Ten seconds. Then ten seconds more. He kept going down.