Chương 31: The Full Truth

Outside was late afternoon. They came out of the depression around the Cathedral entrance and up to the level ground beside the guild archways, and the city noise reached them again — distant, constant — and Domrek found a flat section of stone at the base of the nearest archway and sat down on it. He set his shield against the stone beside him and put his elbows on his knees and looked at Kaito and waited. He didn't say anything. He wasn't going to say anything.

He was going to give Kaito the room until Kaito did something with it. Kaito sat down on the stone across from him. He'd been deciding what to say since the puzzle room on the third floor, and he still didn't know where to start.

"In the world I came from," he said, "there are craftsmen who build worlds." Domrek didn't say anything.

"Not paintings. Not stories. Complete worlds — geography, climate, history, things that live in them. Rules that govern how those things work. A craftsman in my field spends years making a world and then other people walk through it and explore it and live in it temporarily. The whole point is that it feels real to the person inside it." He stopped.

"It isn't real. The people inside know it isn't real. They go home afterward. But while they're in it, the world follows its own rules and the things in it behave the way the craftsman designed them to behave." Domrek sat still. Listening.

"My craft was building worlds," Kaito said.

"I spent six years on one. I built the geography — five continents. I built the history. I built the rules for how power worked — levels, classes, skills — and a System to govern it all. I built the monsters and the dungeons. I built the gods." He stopped again.

"I called it Eirath." Domrek looked at him. He didn't move.

"I built this world," Kaito said.

"Everything in it came from my design. The Compact. The dungeons. The three suns. The System that governs your levels and your class and every number attached to your existence. I made it." He looked at the stone between his feet.

"The dungeon we just walked through — the Iron Cathedral — was my favorite thing in the entire design. I used to say it was my masterpiece. I built the puzzle room on the third floor on a Thursday and I went home thinking about it for three days. I didn't know anyone was going to actually live in it." He stopped.

"I made it and I thought it was imaginary and apparently it wasn't. And I don't know which of those two facts is more unsettling — that a world I built for entertainment is real, or that a world I thought was real has been running on the design choices of a twenty-eight-year-old with bad management and a tight deadline." Domrek said nothing. The craft Kaito was describing had no direct equivalent in Eirath, and he knew it. He'd chosen the closest words he had.

"The company I worked for canned the project three days before we were supposed to release it to the public," he said.

"Six years. The head of the company decided it wasn't going to make enough money and pulled it. Everyone who'd worked on it — the artists, the writers, the engineers — they all found out through an announcement. No warning. No conversation." He kept his voice flat.

"I stayed late that night to destroy the data. The server rack — the machine the world was stored on — fell on me. I didn't move fast enough." He kept his voice level, the same way he kept his voice level when he was explaining a dungeon trap to someone who hadn't seen it yet.

"I died in a protest that had already failed. Alone. Angry. Thinking the world I'd built meant nothing, because it was never going to see daylight." He lifted his head.

"I woke up here. Thirty-one days ago. Inside my own design. Ten thousand years after I built it." He stopped. He'd said it. All of it. It hadn't taken as long as he'd expected. Domrek didn't fill the silence. He sat with it, the way he sat in the food stall when a conversation was running, giving it space to land. The afternoon sat around them. The distant noise of the city. The old stone of the guild archways. The Cathedral behind them in its depression, quiet, unchanged where it had always been unchanged.

Kaito waited. He didn't know what he was waiting for, except that he was waiting, and it occurred to him that this was what it felt like to say a true thing out loud for the first time and have no idea what came back. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Domrek looked at the ground for a long moment. Then he looked up.

"So you made us," he said.

"All of us. And then you died trying to save us." He paused.

"And now you're here."

"Yes." Domrek was quiet for another few seconds.

"You know what I think?" he said.

"I think Eirath knew exactly what it was doing." Kaito had no response to that.

"The world doors," Domrek said.

"I've met three outsiders. They all came through confused — the world was nothing like what they knew, they had no idea what was happening, they needed months to find their feet. You came through knowing the rules. Knowing the dungeons. Knowing how the classes worked." He looked at Kaito steadily.

"I thought that was strange from the beginning. I thought you were the least confused outsider I'd ever met. And then you walked through a dungeon you designed and found a crystal you hid and opened a door that had no handle by standing in exactly the right place." A pause.

"I stopped wondering if something unusual was happening about five floors in."

"Domrek—" Domrek held up one wide hand. He wasn't finished.

"You made my people," he said.

"The slave pits. The Compact. The city up there with two million people who all have a number next to their names that determines how much the world cares about them." He wasn't angry. His voice was the same even, warm register it always was.

"You made all of that. Including the bad parts." Kaito had been waiting for anger since the third floor. Any version of this conversation he'd imagined had the anger in it somewhere. Domrek looked at the ground for a moment. His face didn't change when he looked back up.

"Yes," Kaito said.

"You made it and you didn't know it was going to be real."

"No."

"And the bad parts are real now." Domrek looked at the ground again for a moment. Just a moment. Then he looked back up.

"So." He reached out his hand. The wide, heavy hand with the weight of something immovable behind it, the same hand that had stopped the Rogue-Kin's momentum cold in the arena four days ago.

"What do we do first." Kaito looked at the hand. Domrek had been reaching toward people since the first day. The scared man in the first bench. Ferrus behind his counter. The cloth slid across the table in the food stall. Each time, deliberate. Each time, because he'd noticed something that needed meeting. He took the hand.

"I need to build something," he said.

"A device. It forces a direct conversation with AXIOM. The god running the System — the same god running your class and your level and the numbers on everyone in that city. I need to talk to it and the only way to make it talk is to build something that takes away its option of ignoring me."

"How long."

"I have the materials for most of it. There are two more things I need to source."

"And after you build it."

"Then I use it. And I have a conversation with the thing that designed the bad parts of the bad parts." He let Domrek's hand go.

"The parts I didn't design." Domrek absorbed this.

"You have help with the sourcing."

"I have—" Kaito thought about how to describe Sable.

"I have a voice that helps me navigate. She knows the materials list." Domrek nodded. He didn't ask about the voice. He filed it the way he filed everything — directly, fully present — and moved on.

"And the thing you're building. What happens if the god doesn't want to be talked to."

"The device doesn't give it a choice." Domrek looked at him for a long moment. The same expression he used when he was deciding about the dungeon first floor — not alarmed, not calculating, just reading the shape of what he was being told.

"The pits," he said.

"Are the Compact's. The Compact answers to the System. The System answers to AXIOM." He paused.

"If AXIOM changes its directives, everything under it changes."

"That's the theory," Kaito said.

"Then I'm in," Domrek said, simply. He stood up and picked up his shield and looked at the city on the horizon, the way you look at a thing you've decided about.

'He just agreed to help you force God into a room,' Sable said.

'I know,' Kaito thought.

'I like him,' she said. She'd been listening to conversations for ten thousand years and she'd never said that about anyone. Kaito filed it and didn't know what to do with it. Kaito stood. They turned toward the city. He saw the person at the far archway when he turned. Standing at the base of the last stone gate, still, facing them. Not moving toward them. Just there.

Then he looked at Kaito's face, and Kaito felt the thread-check — felt it the way he felt the dungeon traps, a brief contact in the System-layer, someone reading his class notation and registration from forty feet out. Quick. Practiced. The kind of thread-check a person ran when they already knew what they were looking for. Then the person turned and walked out through the archway and was gone.

'That was deliberate,' Sable said, very quiet.

'That was someone who knows how to read threads at range. They ran a full notation check. They have your class. Your anomalous registration. Everything the arena register caught.' A pause.

'The flag that went to the pile of two hundred and forty. Someone found it. And now someone has it specifically.' He stood in the afternoon outside the Iron Cathedral, with Domrek beside him and the city ahead and the Axiom Key half-built in his coat, and thought about what it meant that someone deliberate had just read him. Not a sweep. Not a random check. Someone had found his flag in the pile and followed it here, to the east of the city, to a dungeon nobody regularly ran, and waited for him to come out.

"Walk," Domrek said.

"Yes," Kaito said. They walked.