Chapter 13. Deeper

That was how my days in Greyfall began, and soon one looked much like another.

At dawn, I met Dorn by the gate. He would already be waiting—grim, carrying the stale scent of the previous night's brew, yet sober and alert in the way he always became the moment we turned toward the Verge. We chose one of the holes scattered around the town; Dorn knew each of them as well as another man knew his own pockets. We descended, worked, and returned before dark with a sack of sparks. In the evening, I took our haul to Kess, ate at Brenna's, counted another handful of copper into my purse, and fell asleep in the shed. The next morning, it all began again.

From the outside, it was dull, punishing work, black with dust and repetition. From within, it was a staircase I climbed toward home, one step at a time.

And I climbed quickly. Too quickly for anyone to miss.

At first, Dorn kept me on the upper tiers, hunting lesser creatures. But before long, they stopped feeding me—not in coin, but in the only currency that truly mattered. I was growing. The System continued to mark my progress, and every few days I turned Analysis upon myself and watched the number rise.

Seven. Nine. Eleven.

I studied eleven longer than the others. Hald had been Level Eleven: the guard who had greeted me with a spear on my first day and had seemed so seasoned, so dangerous then. Now I had caught up with him, even though I kept myself restrained, struck with only part of my strength, and concealed the rest. In truth, there was far more inside me. Within weeks, I had outgrown the town guard as a child outgrows an old coat, and I was still growing. That was beginning to frighten even me.

Dorn saw it. Dorn was no fool.

“You've grown again,” he said one day at the bottom of a shallow dungeon, studying the creature I had brought down a little faster and more cleanly than I should have. I had let myself get carried away. “I brought you to the third tier because the upper two had become grass beneath your boots. And now you're bored here too.” With a grunt, he straightened. “In twenty-two years, I've never seen anyone climb like this. It isn't natural, boy. People don't grow that way.”

“Then I must be doing it wrong,” I said.

“No. It means there's something wrong about you,” he corrected calmly. “But I knew that already.”

He did not press me. He never pried at my secret, and for that alone I was almost more grateful to him than for anything else. He simply accepted that I was not quite like other men and trained the man standing before him. The old wolf did not care why I was different. He cared whether I would live to see the following day.

The problem was that none of it was enough.

I was advancing quickly, but I needed to reach home faster still. Each evening, as I counted copper into my purse, I would catch myself counting something other than coins. I counted how many more evenings, how many more holes, how many more marks from the System stood between me and the door I had closed behind me on that last morning. The number stretched so far that my vision darkened. Leo would grow up in that time. Mira would grow old. And here I was, cutting down worthless creatures on the third tier of a nursery dungeon beside a bridge.

So I began pushing to go lower.

“Take me deeper,” I told Dorn one afternoon after we climbed back into daylight. “I'm wasting time on the upper tiers. The sparks are dim, and the creatures are weak. The rewards are better below, and I grow faster. I'm ready.”

Dorn looked at me for a long while.

“Ready,” he repeated. “Perhaps your strength is. Your head isn't.” He sat on a stone and stretched out his bad leg. “What did I tell you at the wall on your first day? The strong don't survive in the Verge. The cautious do. And you're strong and impatient. That's the surest mixture I know for putting a young man in the ground. Everyone wants to go lower. The sparks are brighter below. So are the graves of everyone who went too soon.”

“I don't have time to be cautious,” I said, and something I usually kept hidden entered my voice. “I have…”

I stopped myself.

Dorn raised his eyes to me.

“You have what?”

I did not answer. I had told no one here about the life I had left behind. Not Brenna. Not Kess. Not Dorn. It belonged to me, and I was not going to lay it on a table for anyone to examine.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just take me deeper.”

Dorn remained silent, watching me, and in his weary eyes I saw that he understood far more than I had said. He had met plenty of people who ran toward something as though something worse were chasing them. He knew what that looked like from the outside.

“Everyone who enters the Verge has something waiting ‘there,’” he said quietly. “Debts. A woman. Someone they never finished mourning. A stain they think they can wash away. Everyone has something. And do you know what I'll tell you? The Verge doesn't give that thing back. It only takes more. No matter how far you descend, it won't send you home any faster. It'll keep you here, in a hole beside all the others who were in a hurry.” He rose with an effort. “I'll take you deeper when I decide you won't get yourself killed. Not before. If you don't like it, find some other fool to guide you.”

I said nothing. I already knew there was no point arguing. Somewhere beneath my impatience, I also knew he was right. That was the most infuriating part.

Some evenings, he stayed longer than usual at Brenna's, and then we sat together by the hearth—he with his usual mug, I with water. On those evenings, old Dorn slowly began to thaw.

He told me about the Verge. Not about creatures and tiers, but about people. Crooked Sam, whose body he had never managed to bring home, and the two fingers he had left behind in the attempt. A woman called Fox, the finest tracker on the frontier, lost on the sixth tier. Dozens of names that meant nothing to me and everything to him. He had outlived them all. He sat across from me, the last of his pack—old, lame, one ear partly gone—and remembered the dead while I listened.

Then one evening, I realized something strange.

The old man had no one. No wife, no children, no family. Everyone he had cared for had remained in the dungeons. He was spending the last years of his life alone, lodging beside another person's tavern and living on a small pension, and the only man to whom he could tell the story of Crooked Sam was a stranger from the forest who had been forced upon him.

Beyond a wall between worlds, I had a son. Three-year-old Leo, with a yellow bucket beneath his bed, calling me home for dinner on the night I never arrived. I was a father without his child—no one left to teach, to hold, to lift laughing toward the ceiling.

We did not speak of it. We did not speak of any of it. Yet in those evenings beside the fire, something in us quietly aligned: absence with absence, one hollow place answering another. An old man with no one left to inherit his craft or carry his memories. A man who had been torn away from everyone he loved. We were neither family nor friends. But each of us filled some nameless emptiness in the other, something neither of us would ever have admitted aloud.

I did not want that. That was the worst of it.

Because I had no intention of staying.

I had known it with absolute certainty since my first night beneath two moons: Greyfall was not a home. It was a step. These people were not my life, only fellow travelers sharing one brief stretch of the road. I had no right to settle here, to care, to put down roots. Roots held a man in place. I needed to leave, and when I did, I needed to travel light and never look back.

Yet the roots grew without permission. Brenna setting a bowl before me without asking. Hald nodding at the gate now as though I belonged. Dorn with his dead companions and his brew. This town, this tavern, this fire. A foreign life had quietly gathered around me and begun offering me a place within it: a name, a trade, people who would know when I failed to return.

Every time I felt it, I turned the ring on my finger.

It was both anchor and bridle. It reminded me that I already had a place. I already had names—husband, father. I already had people: two of them, beyond the walls of worlds, eight minutes from home. Everything this warm hearth offered was an illusion. Not betrayal, exactly, but a quiet trap that wanted me to forget and remain. Do not forget. Do not remain. Rise and go.

And I rose. I did not go—not yet—but each time, I reminded myself that I would.

The weeks passed. Then came the thing I had not expected.

I stopped growing.

At first, the number had risen easily: creature by creature, spark by spark, step by step. But Dorn kept me on the safer upper tiers, and just as he had warned, they soon became no more dangerous than grass beneath my boots. That was when the System first betrayed my expectations. I defeated the same Pale Ones and gathered the same dim sparks, but the number in my status no longer moved. One day, then another, then an entire week. Nothing changed.

For a while, I could not understand why. Then I did, and the answer was simple and bitter. The creatures Dorn allowed me to face had become too weak. Too small. Too far beneath me. The System no longer considered them a threat, so it no longer rewarded me for defeating them. I could hunt them until I grew old and remain exactly what I was.

By then, Kess had awarded me Bronze rank earlier than anyone he could remember, and he still studied me with that same keen, calculating gaze. But the bronze badge on its cord belonged to the outside. Within, the only number that might lead me home had stopped. Outwardly, I was rising. Inside, I was trapped.

One night, I turned Analysis upon myself and saw the same number yet again—fourteen, as it had been yesterday, the day before, and the week before that. Then I understood completely.

At this pace, I would never make it.

If I remained on the safe upper tiers, clearing away worthless creatures and protecting myself from every danger, I would not grow stronger by even the smallest measure. I would become stranded in Greyfall—fed, unhurt, copper in my purse and bronze on my chest—and grow old beside this warm hearth without ever gaining the strength to begin the road home. Dorn's caution was keeping me alive. That same caution had become a tether. And no one reached home on a tether.

To grow, I needed enemies that could still defeat me. To become stronger, I had to accept the danger and descend where Dorn refused to take me. There was no other way upward, and upward was the only direction that led home.

Somewhere beyond the wall between worlds, my son fell asleep without me for another night. Then another. I did not know how much time had passed there—whether time moved as it did here, faster, or in some other way entirely. I did not even know that. The uncertainty clenched inside me like a cold fist.

I closed my eyes, turned the ring on my finger, and understood that the decision had already been made—long before I admitted it to myself.

No more standing still. No more mistaking safety for progress.

It was time to go down.