Halden didn’t sleep. He sat by the dying embers of his fire, his eyes fixed on the entrance of his shack. He kept expecting the "spheres" on the cavern floor to expand back into monsters, but they remained—dense, silent pellets of compressed bone and meat.
Victoria sat across from him. She wasn't sleeping either, but she wasn't awake in any way Halden understood. She sat in a state of perfect stasis, her breathing so shallow it didn't even stir the dust on her robes. She looked like a weapon leaning against a wall, waiting for the next hand to claim it.
"Why me?" Halden finally asked. His voice was a dry rattle. "Out of all the wretches rotting in this hole... why did you stop here?"
Victoria’s eyes opened. They didn't gradually focus; they were simply on.
"Because you were a variable I hadn't calculated," she said. "A man who chooses to stay in a tomb usually has a reason. I wanted to see if that reason was strength or cowardice."
Halden flinched as if she’d struck him. "And? What did you find?"
"Neither," Victoria said, standing up. The movement was fluid, lacking any of the stiffness of a human body. "I found a man who forgot that the sun exists because he became too comfortable in the dark. Stagnation isn't survival, Halden. It’s a slow suicide."
She walked to the door of the shack and looked out at the jagged horizon of the cavern.
"I’m leaving for Floor 9," she stated. "The migration I mentioned... it’s not just goblins. Something is waking up in the lower strata. If you stay here, you won't be eaten. You’ll be absorbed. You’ll become part of the floor, another texture for the next mage to walk over."
She didn't look back to see his reaction. She didn't have to.
At dawn, Halden began to pack.
It was a pathetic assembly of items. A rusted knife, a tattered cloak, and a small, cracked locket containing a portrait of a woman whose face he could barely remember. As he stepped out of his shack, he looked at the stone walls he had lived within for twelve years. He had thought this place was his fortress. Now, looking through Victoria's eyes, he saw it for what it was: a cage.
He walked to the junction where the path split—up toward the surface, or down toward the abyss.
Victoria was standing there, her back to him. She had etched a mark into the stone wall with her thumb—a sigil that hummed with a low, violet vibration. It was a gravitational anchor, a "No Entry" sign for the things that prowled the dark.
"Is she still there?" Halden asked, referring to his sister.
"She’s in the capital," Victoria said, her voice carrying a rare, sharp edge of truth. "She has three children. The eldest has your eyes. She tells them stories about a hero who stayed behind to hold the gate. Don't make a liar out of her, Halden."
Halden felt something in his chest crack—not with pain, but with the sudden, violent return of blood to a numbed limb. He turned his back on the descent. He turned his back on the girl who had shattered his world.
"What will you do?" he called out, his voice stronger than it had been in a decade. "When you reach the Palace? What's at the end for someone like you?"
Victoria stepped into the darkness of the Floor 9 transition. Her shadow stretched out, long and jagged, until it was swallowed by the deep.
"I'm going to finish the song," her voice drifted back, cold and haunting.
Halden began the climb. It was grueling. His lungs burned, his muscles screamed, and the "Dungeon-Cough" tore at his throat. But for the first time in twelve years, the pain felt like it belonged to him. He wasn't a variable in an equation anymore.
He was a man going home to meet a sister who had already buried him.
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