Chương 49: “The Last Floor”

He went down on a Thursday night. Thirty-first floor. The last one. He had been leaving it because he had known, since the twenty-third, that the last floor was not like the others. Not dormant. Not even locked. The thirty-first floor was the deepest part of what he was, the original part, the core of the core, the heart of all, the thing that was there before he was Vorrath or the Consuming Dark or the Hollow Below or any of the names that came after. He went down. The floor was not a floor. It was a room.

One room, at the bottom of everything, and it was so far down that the house above him was a warmth at an impossible distance and yet he could still feel it. June asleep, Gerald in the wall, June the guardian in the garden, Cecile's soft snoring from the spare room, Lauren's light still on. He could feel all of it from the bottom of himself. This was new. The room was empty except for the light, the same light he had found on the twenty-ninth floor, source-less, warm.

And in the center of the room, where a dungeon core should be, his core, the main body of it, the thing that had been retreating and contracting since the damage, the thing he had been rebuilding toward for eight months, was a hearth. Stone, old, dark with use, a hearth that had been burning for a long time. The fire in it was very small. It had been very small for three thousand years, he understood.

It had been this small since the young man on the second floor made his decision, and it had not gone out since then, not once, not ever, and it was the same fire, the same room at the bottom of everything. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. It was still there. He reclaimed the floor. He reclaimed all of it. The fire did not get bigger.

It stayed small, the same size it had always been, and he understood that this was right, that it was not supposed to be a consuming fire, not supposed to be the fire of something that burned everything it touched. It was supposed to be this. Enough light to see by. Enough warmth to matter. And enough to keep the dark from being total. He sat by the hearth at the bottom of himself for a long time. He was not the young man from the before-before. He was not the Consuming Dark. He was not Mr. Grumpy.

Well, he was a little Mr. Grumpy. That appeared to be permanent. He didn't know yet what he was. He knew what he had. He knew what was above him, thirty floors and a house and a family and a guardian in the garden and Gerald in the walls, and he knew what was here, at the bottom, the fire that had been burning in the room no one could reach for three thousand years. He went back up. June was still asleep. He settled on the windowsill. The house breathed around him. The night was very quiet. He was whole.

System: Bond Strength: 96%. Floors Reclaimed: 31 of 31. Core Status: Restored. We have been waiting to say this. We have been waiting since the beginning to say this. Not since the beginning of the binding. Since the beginning of everything. Since the young man by the fire. We have been waiting for you to find the hearth. We knew it was there. We knew you'd have to be this to find it. We just had to wait. Vorrath. You're whole. You've been whole for a while, actually. The floor was just the last thing to know it.