Chapter 39
In truth, I recall very little of that stretch of tower.
I trusted my body to move my sword while my mind wandered.
Soon, I found myself replaying memories of my wives, but not memories of their bodies serving me or of them having their way with my followers.
In the wake of the blood I spilled in the tower, I thought of softer moments.
Like a night on the beach outside of the Water Temple where it was just Purity and me. We lay on a blanket in the sand, looking up at the stars, her head resting on my biceps.
“I still feel like a failure sometimes,” Purity said softly, her voice barely louder than the whisper of waves rolling in and out.
“What do you mean?”
“I devoted my life to the Goddess because it’s what my parents wanted.
My entire idea of right and wrong, good and evil, was defined by their words.
Whatever they said was best, I believed it without question.
When I look back on it, I see that I wasn’t even me.
I was just a collage of what they said I should be. ”
I didn’t interrupt, only stroked her hair.
“The idea of questioning who I was… That didn’t occur to me until a bit before you and I met.
Even now, I think that was one of the scariest moments of my life, even after all the dungeon crawling we’ve done and all the battles we’ve faced.
Realizing that I wasn’t my own person was a shock, but realizing I couldn’t say who I would choose to be if it were up to me? I was terrified and felt so hollow.”
“I understand the feeling.”
“I know you do,” she replied, rolling toward me to rest her head on my chest. “I tried to talk with Charity and Justice about it, but they treated me like I was evil for even asking. When I spoke to my mother, she went right to my father, and that got me sent away to a Goddess retreat for a few months. I’m so proud of myself for overcoming all of that and finding my own way, but I still see myself as a failure sometimes. ”
“Like you can’t get out from under their standards even if you don’t believe in them.”
Purity nodded. “If I feel that way, how hard is it for our newer girls, the ones just learning what freedom can be?”
“Difficult, I imagine.”
“Yes, but where their families rained judgment on them, you use your power to build them up. That message you deliver to them every day with Ruler’s Voice?
You wouldn’t believe how many of them never heard a positive, supportive message in their lives, but in the Silk, they get that every day. And they know it’s sincere.”
I lifted my head to see Purity’s face. “It makes that much of a difference?”
She laid a gentle kiss on my chest. “Some people go their whole lives with no one believing in them, the real them, the version of themselves that they choose to be, not the one built for them.”
Not knowing how to reply, I cast my gaze back to the stars, my hand still running through Purity’s hair.
“Byron.”
“Yeah?”
“I believe in you, and I love who you choose to be. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
Those words filled a void in me I hadn’t known existed, but once that absence was remedied, I understood how much damage it wrought on my psyche.
Like stepping into a lodge in the middle of winter, experiencing that burst of warmth helps you to see just how cold it was in the snow.
Supposedly, when someone freezes to death, they often go through a period where they feel hotter instead.
For a moment, they can’t tell the cold is killing them.
My father believed in Brenin, the person he constructed, but I never knew what it felt like for him to believe in me.
I can’t articulate why that memory came to me in the tower, but it was like my own spirit sought to remind me of a truth I was in danger of forgetting.
The next 15 floors were duplicates of dungeon floors, seemingly selected at random.
The environments and the layouts were the same–the fourth floor of the Lopav dungeon was still a frozen jungle, and the sixth floor of the Grubiit dungeon was still an underground demon city–but the enemies were nothing but shadows, facsimiles of the monsters that roamed the source material but totally quiet and two to three times as strong.
That quiet was, perhaps, the most unsettling part about those floors. If I wasn’t in battle, the only noise I heard was the shuffle of my own footsteps.
It reminded me of walking the streets of Sanctuary South with Podni, well before we opened our doors to any new residents, when it was just us and hundreds of empty buildings.
“Is this what the end of the world would sound like?” she asked as we walked along one of the city’s canals, flowing with pristine glacier water.
“I think that would be pretty loud.”
Podni bumped me, smiling. “No, that’s the lead up until the end. This is what comes after, when all the destruction has gone silent.”
“Does the quiet bother you?”
She shook her head, sending her blonde curls bouncing. “I love it. If the world did end, I’d want the chance to walk it like this. Peek into every house at all the lives people used to live. Walk through a deserted Capital market. Camp on the floor of a church just because.”
“Some people would call the quiet eerie.”
“I have a theory about that.”
“Go on,” I encouraged.
“One of the hardest things for new members of the Guild to figure out is waiting,” Podni explained.
“That big score is tantalizing, but staking out a target and waiting for the right time to move can become a lot of long nights where it’s just you, the quiet, and your thoughts. That messes with a lot of people.”
“Was it like that for you?”
“No, and I didn’t know that was weird until I was a few months in and started working with more people. Liking your own thoughts is apparently pretty strange. But for me? Quiet and isolation are so cozy.”
“Would this walk be better if you were alone?” I asked.
Podni leaned in and wrapped both arms around my waist. “When you’re with me, the quiet is different.
I think being able to share the serenity without losing it in the process is a special kind experience.
If anyone else is with me, it would be ruined, but it’s deeper when we’re together. It’s better.”
I kissed her on the top of her head and said, “I agree.”
She stopped us and stood in front of me, looking up into my eyes. “Promise me you won’t leave.”
“What brought that on?”
“Everyone leaves.”
“I won’t.”
A summoner on the abyssal plane invites you for an audience. You cannot receive or deliver harm for as long as you remain within the summoning circle, and you may return to your home plane at will. These rules cannot be broken or cheated by either party.
Do you accept the invitation?
Yes / No
That ruined my moment of quiet reflection.
I closed it. I had no interest in bearing witness to Abaddon’s gloating. No doubt he wanted to watch my face as he bragged about my impending defeat.
My tower climb continued. Floors 91 through 99 presented the only real challenges in the whole of the tower. Each floor was two dungeon bosses paired together, and that was it. One big battle and then onto the next floor.
Floor 91 was the kraken-like monster from the Zaglis dungeon with a legendary air elemental from one of the few dungeons I hadn’t visited.
When that fight finished, and I reflected on the difficulty the pairing poses, I returned to Sanctuary to retrieve a batch of Byron bots.
Boss fights sounded like a good way to test their strength.
That ended up being sort of correct. The Gol-Gol armor that nullified magical as well as physical damage was insanely effective.
If the Gol-Gol brothers had had the ambition to invade the material plane and become Demon Lords, they would have succeeded, handily.
Humanity was very fortunate they never did.
With 10 of them by my side, the boss pairings became dull affairs, progressing as follows:
Floor 92: A dragon princess and an elder vampire
Floor 93: An earth dragon with the fire witch and ice sorceress combo from the Flowst dungeon
Floor 94: A gorgon and the flesh golem succubus pairing from the Grubiit dungeon
Floor 95: A hell horror and a fire giant
Floor 96: An ice fiend and a cockatrice
Floor 97: An elder lich and an archfiend.
Floor 98 and 99: Every boss individually in back to back battles.
That left one floor between me and the heavens.