Chương 75: Domrek's Question

'When you say you built this world,' Domrek said, 'do you mean you built all of us. Our histories. Our pain.' He said it plainly. No heat in it. The kind of question a man asked when he'd carried it long enough that the asking itself didn't scare him anymore, only the answer did. Kaito didn't say anything right away. He thought about the pits.

Domrek had told him once — sold at eight, fifteen years in the circuit, a mother who fought and a father he never knew, the specific kind of anger you had to carry just to survive a structure like that. He thought about whether any of that had come from a document he'd written at twenty-six years old, half-asleep, trying to hit a deadline.

'I don't know,' he said.

'I want to give you a real answer, not a fast one. Let me think it through out loud.'

'Take your time,' Domrek said.

'When I built this world,' Kaito said, 'I wrote a framework. Continents, factions, a System for levels and classes, history documents for the major nations going back centuries. I wrote lore bibles for races — Dwarf-Kin included. General stuff. Pit fighting existed in the lore because I thought it made the world feel lived-in. Slavery existed in some regions because I wanted consequences to feel real, not soft.' He stopped.

'I wrote the shape of a world where a kid could be born in a pit and sold at eight and fight for fifteen years. I wrote that as background color for a fantasy MMO. I want you to know that. I'm not going to pretend it was something more careful than it was.' Domrek's face didn't change.

'But I didn't write you,' Kaito said.

'I didn't write Domrek Ironhide. I didn't write a mother who fought in the pits or a day you didn't get sold until you were eight instead of six or any of the specific things that happened to you. I wrote a setting where that kind of life was possible. The world had ten thousand years to fill in everyone who actually lived in it.' He looked at him.

'I think the difference matters. I built the box. I didn't put you in it.'

'Who did,' Domrek said.

'I don't know,' Kaito said.

'Maybe nobody did. Maybe that's just what happens when you build a system with structure like that and leave it running for ten thousand years. People get born into the worst parts of what you made and they have to survive it the same way people have always had to survive bad systems — by being smarter than the system expected, or tougher, or both.' He thought about it more.

'You said something to me once, in the Howling Dark. You said I built it, but not for you specifically. You said I'd have to decide whether the distinction mattered.'

'I remember,' Domrek said.

'I think it matters,' Kaito said.

'Not because it lets me off the hook. It doesn't. I wrote a world where the pits could exist and people like you could get sold into them, and that's mine, that's on me, I'm not going to pretend otherwise.' He held Domrek's eyes.

'But whatever you are now — the man who figured out how to survive fifteen years without losing the parts of himself worth keeping, the man who walked out and decided not to carry the anger with him, the man who put his hand on my shoulder after the pits like it was nothing — I didn't write that. Nobody designed that. You built that yourself, out of fifteen years that should have broken you and didn't.' The room was quiet.

'Whatever you are now,' Kaito said, 'you built yourself.' Domrek didn't say anything for a long time. Long enough that Kaito started to wonder if he'd said the wrong thing, or said it in the wrong order, or said too much when less would have been kinder.

'My mother,' Domrek said eventually.

'I think about her sometimes. I don't know if she's still alive. I don't know if she ever got out. I don't know if she's a real person who lived a real life somewhere in this world right now, or if she's — ' He stopped. Started again.

'I don't know what she is. If you wrote the pits into the lore as background color, was she background color too. Or is she real. Somewhere. Right now.' Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

'I don't know,' Kaito said. Honest.

'I didn't write a specific woman named your mother. I wrote that pit fighters in that region sometimes had families inside the system, generationally, because that's how those structures usually worked in the source material I was drawing from.' He paused.

'If she exists — and I think she probably does, the same way you exist — then she's real the same way you're real. Not a background detail. A person the world built out of the space I left for one.'

'That's not a clean answer,' Domrek said.

'No,' Kaito said.

'I don't have a clean one. I'm sorry.' Domrek looked at him for a while.

'You designed a world,' he said, 'where children get sold for fighting. Where a kid like me ends up owned by people who only see what he can earn them.' His voice wasn't accusing. It was just laying the fact down, flat, the way he laid most facts down.

'You did that at twenty-six, half-asleep, trying to hit a deadline. You said that yourself.'

'I did.'

'And then ten thousand years later, you woke up inside it. And the first thing the world handed you was a man it had built out of the worst part of what you designed.' He sat back.

'That's either the cruelest joke a god could play on someone, or it's the only way you were ever going to understand what you'd actually made.'

'Maybe both,' Kaito said.

'Maybe both,' Domrek agreed. He was quiet again. Outside, the city had started waking up properly — a cart somewhere, a door, the first real noise of morning replacing the hush that had carried them home from the palace.

'I've been angry about a lot of things in my life,' Domrek said.

'I told you once, the anger was right. Everything I was angry about deserved it.' He looked at his hands.

'I don't think I'm angry at you. I've turned this over for a long time, trying to figure out if I should be, and I keep landing in the same place. You didn't put me in the pits. You wrote a world where pits were possible and then you died and ten thousand years happened without you, and somewhere in those ten thousand years, I happened. The space between those two things is too big to put a single man's name on it.'

'You don't have to forgive me,' Kaito said.

'I'm not asking for that.'

'I know,' Domrek said.

'I'm not doing it because you asked.' He stood up. He crossed the small room and put his hand on Kaito's shoulder, the same weight he'd used after the pits, after the dungeon under the mountain, the gesture that didn't need explaining between them anymore.

'All right,' he said.

'Then I forgive you.' Kaito looked up at him.

'You don't have to mean that today,' he said.

'You can take it back if it doesn't hold.'

'I know how forgiveness works,' Domrek said.

'It's not a door you lock once. I'll probably have to choose it again tomorrow, and the day after that, every time I think about my mother and wonder if she's real and out there somewhere I can't reach.' He squeezed once and let go.

'But I'm choosing it today. That's what today gets.' He went back to the table and picked up the bread he'd brought up, like the conversation hadn't just rearranged something fundamental between them, because that was also Domrek — say the hard thing, mean it, and then eat breakfast. Kaito sat on the edge of the bed and didn't move for a moment.

'Sable,' he said quietly.

'I'm here.'

'You heard all of that.'

'Yes.'

'Say something.' She was quiet for a moment, the way she got when she was choosing carefully.

'I've watched a great many people decide how to carry what was done to them,' she said.

'I have never watched anyone decide to forgive the person who built the world that did it. There isn't a category for what he just did. I don't think there's a word for it in any language I'm carrying.'

'Is that good or bad,' Kaito said.

'I don't know yet,' she said.

'But Kaito — if a man can do that, knowing everything he knows, then there might be something in this world worth all the trouble you're about to be in.' A pause, and her voice shifted, careful again, alert in a new direction.

'Speaking of trouble. Someone's at the door.' Domrek's head came up from the bread. A knock — quiet, deliberate, three taps with a pause between the second and third that felt less like a greeting and more like a signal. Kaito stood.

'Compact,' he said.

'No,' Sable said.

'Different notation. I don't recognize this one at all.'