Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I was standing in front of a doorway leading into a shoddily built house. I didn’t exactly know what to expect behind that door. The storm that had been battering the Winter Wing had finally calmed a little. My jacket still barely protected me from the cold and everything was still frozen, but the full blown flurry of the storm had died off after I’d helped out the echo.

  I took a step back and looked around, hoping that the echo had left an object behind that I could use to help the gardener. Maybe he left a hammer or a trowel or a pair of gloves or something else that might be useful in the Spring Wing. But I didn’t find anything there. The only thing around was bits and bobs from the construction that the echo had been doing.

  I didn’t know what else I needed to do to solve the next piece of the puzzle. The echo hadn’t left anything behind and I dreaded searching through the snow drifts for anything useful. So, I did the only thing that made any sense. I opened the door to the shelter and stepped inside.

  The change was immediate. One second I was being flayed alive by the wind and the next there was silence. I stepped fully into the cabin and blinked, taken aback by the fact that it was not what I was expecting.

  The cabin wasn’t all that large, but it radiated comfort. It felt lived in. Cozy. A fire crackled in a stone hearth nearby, throwing soft light across the wooden walls. The storm rushed past the windows, rattling them, but the air inside the cabin was pleasant and warm and it smelled faintly of pine.

  A handmade table was in the middle of the cabin, ringed by mismatched chairs. One of the chairs had a worn flannel shirt draped over the back, like someone had just shrugged it off and planned to come back for it. Shelves lined the walls, crammed with old paperbacks and tools and little carved figurines.

  Above the fireplace was a portrait of a woman. She had a strong jawline and clever eyes and a quiet confidence about her. Her portrait somehow filled the cabin and I could immediately tell that she mattered to the echo who’d built this place.

  Wife? Partner? Someone that he’d lost, maybe? Someone he’d built this entire cabin for?

  Photos lined the mantle piece under the portrait. They were faded snapshots, each of which showed the same set of people. One of the pictures caught my eye. It was of a man with a gentle smile kneeling next to two girls. The youngest girl was missing her two front teeth and she was beaming up at the camera. The older one was caught mid-eye-roll, showing the burden of being the older sibling.

  As I stared at the pictures on the mantle, the sheer weight of the place hit me. This was the completed shelter that the echo had been building. That crooked skeleton of a thing that he’d been hammering together while battered by a never-ending storm was gone. And in its place was a beautiful home. It was the cabin that he’d seen in his head every time he raised a beam, every time he swung a hammer, every time he drove in a nail. This was the finished version of the thing he never got to complete.

  I took it all in. The comfort of it. The homey feeling. I imagined the quiet of the place settling in on the family that lived there. The warmth. The life that could have been. And for the first time since entering the Winter Wing, I felt something other than the cold seeping into my bones.

  Before I lost myself too deeply in my daydreams, I turned towards the hand carved table in the middle of the room and found what I needed. It was a flower, suspended in a pristine glass container. It was the object that would help the gardener.

  The flower was gorgeous. I can’t think of a better word to describe it. Deep purple petals unfurled in slow motion making the whole thing look like it was blooming underwater. The stem twisted and curled in an elegant spiral and the petals looked almost impossibly soft.

  I don’t know what kind of flower it was. I mean, to be fair, I could only really name around five flowers and two of those are just colors. But this one…ya, describing it would just make it sound much less impressive than it actually was.

  I carefully lifted the entire glass container and tucked it away inside my burlap sack, then took one last look around the cabin. I smiled at what the mansion had created. Then I braced myself, opened the door, and stepped back out into the biting cold.

  The entrance hall greeted me with its usual quiet grandeur, but there was something different now. The air felt less heavy. Calmer, maybe? I stopped in the middle of the hall and looked around, trying to figure out what had changed. My eyes moved to the grand staircase and the second floor. The presence that I had felt coming from the second floor was…muted now. Placid.

  I shoved that thought out of my head and instead made my way into the Spring Wing. It only took a few moments to pick my way through the overgrown forest before I came across the echo of the gardener again.

  He was exactly like I’d left him: leaning over a planting table and doing something with his hands there. Nothing was in front of him and I knew what I needed to do. I carefully unslung my burlap sack from my back and pulled out the glass container with the flower in it before setting it into an empty spot in front of him.

  As soon as I put the flower down it shimmered faintly under the soft light of the Spring Wing. The purple petals glowed and the gardener froze. His hands hovered over the flower for a brief moment and I held my breath, waiting to see what would happen.

  He burst into motion. He reached out and removed the top of the container and a hush filled the room. Slowly he grabbed the flower with both hands and gently placed it inside a pot filled with planting soil. The preserved boom slid into place as if it had always belonged there. He gently patted the soil with practiced care and then leaned close to the flower.

  I moved closer to hear him as he spoke for the first time. He wasn’t speaking to me. Hell, I don’t think he was even speaking to the plant. Instead, I got the feeling that he was speaking to someone that only he could see. He leaned up close to the flower and whispered a name into the petals, so softly that I almost missed it.

  “Evienne.”

  Then he was gone. No sound. No flash of light. He just dissolved into the warm spring air. I waited, sure that something would happen and point me to what I needed to do next. All the other echoes had left an item behind. The noble had given me the ribbon charm and the library echo had left the music box. This echo had to leave me some sort of item, or else what was the end of the puzzle?

  But there was nothing. There was no sparkle of magic or a dropped relic or an item that stood out to me. I checked all around where the gardener had been working, poked at the tools and shifted the pots about, but could find anything that had been left behind. I stood there in front of the planting table for a while longer, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, but the silence of the mansion started pressing in on me. I was feeling like the final house guest at a party, unsure whether to help clean up after everyone left or if I should just leave.

  So I left.

  I know, I know. It’s a dick thing to do normally. You always wanna take out the trash or do the dishes or something that would help out the host. But this wasn’t a house party. It was a creepy ass mansion. And there was nothing left for me in the Spring Wing. So I made my way back to the entrance hall, dragging my feet a little since I didn’t really have a plan on what to do next.

  The entrance hall looked exactly as it had before: tall ceilings, grand staircase leading to the second floor, presence that seemed a bit more muted after I completed the puzzle, five hallways that split off into different directions.

  Wait. Five hallways?

  I did a double take and noticed that a fifth hallway had somehow appeared. I knew that there’d only been four hallways before. I’d walked through them all. Solved their puzzles. Helped their echoes move on. But as my eyes drifted through the hallway again, they suddenly settled on a fifth hallway that hadn’t been there before.

  It was tucked into a wall to the right of the grand staircase, partially hidden in shadow. Not completely hidden. It was there. But somehow I’d missed it in my wanderings. That didn’t make a lot of sense because I’d walked through the entrance hall so many times it would have been impossible for me to miss.

  I stared at the entrance for a long second before finally shrugging my shoulders and taking a step forward. Something about it tugged at me and I didn’t question it. I just stepped forward and walked into the fifth hallway.

  It was shorter than the other four. Weirdly short. After the winding and shifting and stretching of the other hallways, this one felt like someone had chopped it down to the bare minimum. I was waiting for a hidden doorway or a turn or detour or some sort of trick. But there was nothing. It was just a straight shot to the end.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The hall opened up into a vast marble chamber. Pale stone gleamed under floating lanterns. Like…legit floating lanterns. I know I’d seen magic being used throughout the house, but something about lanterns floating and bobbing through the air surprised me. Their reflections stretched across the surface of a shallow circular pool set in the center of the room. The water was perfectly still and I edged closer to it, half expecting something to leap out or some glowing quest item to bob to the surface.

  For some reason I started wondering about the pool in front of me. Was it a decorative fountain or a ritual bath? Maybe it was some kind of ceremonial well. What did fancy mansions have hidden behind their hallways?

  Then the practical part of my brain, the part that didn’t want to die from dehydration, kicked in. Water was water. I was headed back to the Deadlands soon with its arid desert and total lack of anything liquid. My throat already felt dry at the thought.

  I rushed to the pool and dropped to my knees and cupped my hands and started drinking greedily. After the first three or so handfuls, I finally paused long enough to notice more of the pool.

  My reflection was gone, and instead the surface rippled with tiny flickering images. It was like someone had taken dozens of home movies and superimposed them onto the water and then pressed play at the same time.

  I leaned in closer to get a better look. One of the images was of the echo from the library. She was years younger than I remembered. Probably a teenager. Her hair was loose and she was caught mid-laugh. The gardener was next to her and he was a teen now too. His cheeks flushed pink as he handed her a sprig of something green. The entire interaction was awkward and sweet and painfully human.

  Another ripple and this time I recognized the noble boy from the Summer Wing. He was surrounded by honeysuckle bushes and was holding a small wrapped gift in his hands. The nerves were writ clear on his face but they vanished when he turned around and the girl he’d danced with stepped into frame. They held hands and leaned into each other and a warmth glowed between them.

  Then it was the man from the Winter Wing. He was older now, but somehow seemed a touch younger. Lighter. He was seated outside his completed shelter, smoking a pipe and reading a book. His shoulders were relaxed and a wave of contentment rolled off him.

  The images shifted rapidly and I watched on with interest. Sometimes the view followed the gardener or the woman from the library. Sometimes it switched to the noble boy. Sometimes it showed the man from the Winter Wing. All the images showed them happy.

  The moments kept playing and I caught glimpses of lives that had been gently stitched together. They weren’t perfect lives. They didn’t have glossy fairytale endings. But they were real. Warm. Quietly happy. Something tightened in my chest as I watched the images and then-

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  The voice startled me and I jerked, nearly falling into the pool. I quickly spun around to find a woman slowly walking into the chamber. The lantern light brushed against her silver hair and her hands were held gently behind her back. Her steps were slow and sure, like grace in motion.

  I knew her. She was the girl from the Summer Wing. The one who’d appeared in a blink and danced with the noble boy. Except…she was older now. Older than when I’d last seen her. Not elderly. Not crone-like. And definitely not frail. But older. Timeless. Her eyes, pale and curious, studied me like she already knew everything I was about to say, but I surprised her.

  “I saw you dance,” I said quietly.

  She smiled at that and the warmth of it hit me. “I hoped you would.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the one who built this House,” she said, stepping up beside me and gazing down at the pool. “Or rather…I inherited it and then shaped it into something worth remembering. My name isn’t particularly important anymore. I doubt most would remember it. You can just think of me as the owner of this place.”

  The owner. Of this place. The twisting halls and impossible seasons and echoes trapped in memory loops. If someone had said that this mansion had an owner, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But this woman? She wasn’t at all what I expected, and at the same time she made perfect sense.

  “Who were they? The echoes. The ones that I helped?”

  She lowered herself to the pool and brushed her hand through the water. The images cycled and she smiled when the echo from the library popped up.

  “Former residents of this place,” she said. “But more than that. They were people that I loved once. My friends. My family.”

  She let a single finger hover over the pool as she watched the woman from the library. She was sitting outside on a warm summer’s day, a book in her hand as she ate lunch.

  “That was my sister,” she said. “Evienne. She studied at the High Academy of Arcane Studies. Always had her nose buried in a book. She wasn’t particularly gifted with spellwork, but she insisted on mastering the most difficult branches of magic because she thought that it was expected of her.”

  “Expected by who?”

  Her mouth curved into something like a wince as she lost herself in the image. Finally she spoke up.

  “Our father. He had a way of breaking things while pretending he was building them. He demanded brilliance from us. Perfection. Excellence. If you weren’t the best at something, then you were a disappointment. And in this house, disappointing him left…marks.”

  I balled my fists at her words. An irrational part of me wanted to find her father and thrash the man to within an inch of his life. The woman noticed the sudden change in my mood and she glanced up at me. When she saw me struggling with anger she gave me a brief smile and shook her head.

  “Not those kinds of marks.” She went quiet for a moment and then sighed. “I tried talking her out of it. Tried to tell her she didn’t need to chase someone else’s idea of greatness. Tried explaining that she didn’t need to prove anything and that she was enough. But she wouldn’t listen. She thought that if she wasn’t the best at something, if she failed him, if she failed anyone, then she’d stop being someone worth loving.”

  My throat tightened and I grew even angrier at that but I didn’t have the time to stew because she was glancing down at the pool again and almost whispering the next few words.

  “She died during an experiment. A spell gone wrong. She was alone when it happened. It wasn’t even her field of study. She just…pushed herself beyond what was safe because she thought she was falling behind. Or she thought that it would make father proud. Or she was trying to prove to herself that she was enough.”

  Her fingers drifted through the pool and the image scattered into fragments before forming a new one. This time it was the boy from the Summer Wing.

  He was dressed in a fine tunic now, looking younger than he had when I’d seen him. His hands cradled something that I couldn’t see and there was a smile on his face.

  “That was Tomas,” she said softly. “My first love. We met when we were children. He lived in one of the nearby villages and he always tried to make people laugh. He had this stubborn belief that the world could be made better if you were just kind enough.”

  Her voice faltered with a wistful smile and she lost herself in the image.

  “We spent summers hiding in the orchard and winters stealing pastries from the kitchens. We made plans. Fantasies, mostly. Our future. Our escape out to a world that was laid before us. He asked me to run away with him once.” Her smile faded. “But when the time came…he said he couldn’t do it. He said he didn’t want me to have to give up everything for him. His family were nobles in name only. They didn’t have any money or titles or anything of worth. He told me that he wanted to make something of himself. Then, when he was strong enough and rich enough and had a name to be proud of, he’d come back for me.”

  She looked up at me and her eyes were glistening with tears. “So he joined the army. Said he’d go out and make a name for himself. But he never came home. Word eventually reached us that his unit vanished during a campaign. No survivors.”

  The woman swept her hand and the image rippled and the gardener appeared. He was young again, smiling through a mess of dark hair. His hands were stained with soil and he cradled something to his chest. Looking closer I realized that he was holding that impossible purple flower that I’d reunited his echo with.

  “Matthieu,” she said softly. “He grew up here. His family tended the grounds for generations. He was like a brother to me. Me, him, and Evienne…we were inseparable."

  Her voice dropped and she leaned in closer to the water as the image showed Matthieu gently planting the flower in a clay pot.

  “He loved her, you know. My sister. Desperately. He never told her. And when she went away to the Academy…he just kept working. Kept tending to the gardens like she’d return any day. He made that flower for her. It was a hybrid of his own invention. Named it after her too. It couldn’t survive without a specific kind of soil. Before she left for the academy, he gave her a tiny cutting of it. He cultivated the thing for years.”

  She watched the image for a while and I could tell she was having trouble talking about her sister. I was tempted to reach out and place a hand on her shoulder and tell her that everything was going to be okay, but I’ve never been really good at emotional support. My hand hovered near her shoulder, but before I could try and offer her anything, she started speaking about her sister again.

  “When we got word of my sister dying, he fell into depression. He stopped tending to the plants and…that flower died. When he finally came back to the gardens and he saw that the flower was gone, it was like he lost her all over again. He…he started obsessing over the lost flower. Tending to the soil and trying to will it back to life. I think he believed that, if he could somehow get it to grow again, then she’d somehow come back to us too.”

  The image faded and was replaced with another. This time it was the old man from the Winter Wing. He was hammering nails into thick wooden beams while the sky grew gray with an approaching storm.

  “My father,” she said. Her voice was tinged with sadness and a little bit of bitterness. “When my mother died…something in him broke. We were all shattered but he…’

  There was a long pause as she stared down at the image of her father working. I knew she was struggling to find the words for what came next. “He didn’t know how to grieve. It was made all the worse because he had two daughters who’d just lost their mother, and he didn’t know how to handle that either. So instead, he poured himself into his work. He was a builder. He built things. Structures. Routines. Rules. Expectations. He taught us that excellence was the only way to be safe. He taught us that love was something you had to earn.”

  Her voice trembled but she didn’t stop. “He thought he was protecting us. He thought that by making us strong and hardening us, we’d be able to survive anything. But he never saw that we were hurting too. He didn’t see that we were breaking ourselves to try and meet his expectations.”

  The image of her father stilled for a heartbeat before she waved her hand over the pool and it disappeared. She stood slowly, smoothing out her dress and then turning to me.

  “This House remembers. It remembers the people and it remembers all the weight that they carried. The hopes they buried. The things they couldn’t say. The actions they couldn’t take.” She gave me a tired little smile. “Thank you, Zeke. You helped them let go.”

  The woman turned and started walking back towards the hallway and so many questions started bubbling up in my head at that moment. Questions about the echoes and how she was able to build this mansion to house all of them. Questions about what I’d done with the items, and whether my actions had changed anything for them. And questions about how she knew my name, what the point of this entire thing was, and if it had all been some sort of test. But there was one question above the others that pushed its way to the surface.

  “Wait,” I called out.

  She paused, half-glancing over her shoulder at me.

  “What am I supposed to do now?”

  The warm, distant smile returned to her. It was the smile that a teacher gives you when they know the answer but want you to figure it out for yourself. Without speaking she simply lifted her hand and gestured towards the pool.

  I turned. Resting at the edge of the water was a small book that I hadn’t noticed before. I stepped close and reached out for it, hoping that it wasn’t going to be like all the useless books from the library.

  When I opened it I found a single line that was written there: we only carry what we care for.

  Then the book shimmered and glowed. I almost dropped it into the pool but, at the last second, it burst apart into fragments that floated like fireflies in the air around me. The fragments sank into my skin and pushed their way into my bones until the last wisp of them drifted into my chest and vanished inside me. For a heartbeat, everything was still.

  [Dimensional Storage Unlocked]

  I wanted to delve into what the hell that meant, but before I could do anything else the floating lanterns around the pool started to dim. The images in the water stilled and disappeared and the room around me began to dissolve. The air shimmered with the residue of magic (is that a thing?) and the walls started to peel back into nothing. The ceiling vanished, the ground beneath my feet softened and started to suck me in, and then, in the space ahead of me, a door appeared.

  It was a simple wooden door, looking exactly like the one that the echo in the Winter Wing had been struggling to build. I took a breath and opened it and then stepped across the threshold.