Sunshine trots energetically around Dan's feet, her panting maw lifted upward. As Dan walks up to his front door, Sunshine occasionally bounces off of her forepaws, reaching her soggy nose for Dan's hand. I look behind me, towards the gravel road, for the last time before heading back inside. The town guards have finally vanished. Dead. Respawned. Memories erased.

I cradle a guilt forming within me. A comforting voice inside of me insists that what I have done is just, but an older voice, gradually growing louder, worries that I have broken a sacred rule. But which voice should I trust?

"Good girl!" Dan says in a childish, praising half-squeal. As I turn my head back forward, I see Dan rubbing his hand rapidly upon the husky's shaggy head. Sunshine's head tilts upward, her eyes squinted in a furry bliss. "You did well tonight, sweetheart," Dan's voice drops a couple octaves. "You clever watchdog, you!"

Hmm, I don't think I've ever heard a dog be called "clever" before. It seems a bit out of place to assign such a high mark of intelligence to a four-legged animal. But then again, Dan does seem quite enamored with that dog...

Dan pats Sunshine on her head before lifting his hand away. She gazes expectantly up at him for a moment, letting out a high-pitched whimper, before giving up her pleading and trotting away.

Dan opens the door and enters, leaving it open behind him. I follow Dan inside of the cobblestone shack, closing the door behind me. There is some place where Dan wants to take me.

The torch's glow retains its unearthly brightness, a perception created by my enhanced vision.

I follow Dan down the narrow staircase, into the room with many bookshelves. The glowstone on the ceiling appears molten, just as before, but still just as strange. He leads me behind all of the bookshelves, toward the end of back wall, where the secret passage leads down into the study. He takes me down those stairs, past the desk, and into the hallway on the left, the one I have never entered.

The hallway remains flat, but it is longer than the others. After about half a minute of walking, we follow the turn in the hallway to the right. My jaw drops in admiration. The walls open up into a grand room, roughly as wide as it is long: perhaps 30 meters in each direction. The walls are made of a purplish black stone, similar to the obsidian I've read about in books, and the corners are held up by wooden beams. As we step onto the wooden flooring, I see that the wide gap in the center of the floor leads deep into the earth, where many levels of wooden flooring hang against the walls, connected with staircases made of thin planes of stone bricks. Glowstone is held in place along the top of each corner by the wooden beams. Some walls are entirely covered with chests, others with shelves containing books, vials, jars, unidentifiable artifacts, and other objects too strange to even classify. On the bottom levels, I can see furnaces, crafting benches, cauldrons filled with water, and strange contraptions composed of glowing orange rods held vertically by cobblestone. The great room has a stately, almost ancient quality to it.

As I follow Dan another step forward onto the wooden floor, I suddenly feel a sense of dread from the incredible depth of the room. I see in my mind, vividly, the mistake of me taking another step forward, slipping off the edge into the room's hollow center, falling through the air for what seems like forever, until my bones shatter upon the ground, each ebony shard piercing its presence into me with a pain only death could bring. I feel nervous of the incredible magic locked away in the chests and emanating from the artifacts on the shelves, a magic far too powerful for me to touch. I cannot trust myself to enter this place safely.

I take a step back, looking at Dan. Space appears to wobble around his grey cloak, in much the same way as the smoke above a flame. I see that from him, too, emanates a strong magic. Should I, by accident, absorb just a tiny percentage of his magical energy, I would be overwhelmed by it. On top of the sheer amount of magic from my enchanted armor, which continues to exhaust me to my limit, it could topple my sanity, as if each logical thread within my mind were a domino. It is a responsibility I cannot bear.

Dan notices that I have halted my footsteps, and turns around to face me.

I express my guilt to Dan, looking into his blue eyes with the most apologetic gaze I can express. His previous advice, "Don't underestimate magic," echoes in my mind with fresh meaning.

"I really shouldn't be here," I say, quietly and humbly. "I'm sorry."

Dan's eyebrows lift. "Oh dear," he says, his voice's echoing loudly from the excess magic spilling out of him. "My sincerest apologies; I forgot to remove the ward."

He lifts his hand upward, the fingers wobbling from the smoke-like distortion. He begins to chant a command in an old, formal dialect, roughly translating to: "From now until the sun rises, let Fristad pass." The instant he says this, the smoke-like distortion of the space around him disappears.

"There we go," says Dan, his voice now at a normal volume again. "That should stop the ward from messing with you, although you'll still feel paranoid for a little while. Stay close to the wall and think of puppies."

Puppies? Okay, then.

I follow Dan around the left perimeter of the room, mindful to keep my head facing the wall. My foot nearly slips on the first step of a stone brick staircase, and the sudden jerky motion makes me forget which way is up. I crouch against the wall, in fear that my thin legs will lose traction on the stone, causing me to slip uncontrollably over the edge. I grasp my skull, trying to remind myself that I am covered in a solid, rough substance, not some liquid, frictionless slime. Get a hold of yourself, Fristad. You've never fallen off a staircase before. Remember that the physical world is a logical place.

I force myself to stand up, and continue walking down the steps very slowly, mindful that each step lands precisely in the middle of the stone brick slab.

Dan slows his pace in front of me. "It's alright, Fristad. There's nothing to be afraid of. Besides, I wouldn't have taken you down into this room if I didn't feel it was so important."

I feel slightly more confident, trying to look away from my boots, letting my legs settle into a slow rhythm. So far so good, as long as I watch out for stairs.

And so we proceed very slowly clockwise, my steps still tense from the possibility of falling, until many floors down later, we reach the very bottom, where the floor is covered in stone bricks. There is one large table in the center of the floor with many glowing orange rods standing upright, and along the walls are narrow tables, cauldrons, furnaces, shelves, and a crafting bench in the middle of each wall, discluding the wall against which hangs the staircase we have just descended.

Dan pulls out two backless wooden chairs underneath the center table. He points one hand at the chair closes to me, beckoning me with his other hand to sit on it.

"I'd remark on how you must be tired from the long journey down those stairs, but you don't have muscles with which to be tired." Dan chuckles. "That's just one of the plus sides of being a skeleton... although I doubt it outweighs the fact that you despise being one."

I walk over to sit on the wooden chair, letting my legs lay limply on the floor. The process does not make me feel relieved, but it at least allows me to get my mind off the process of walking. I look up at the levels of wooden walls and spiral staircases stretching upward towards the ceiling. It was difficult enough to get down without falling - I shudder - but I can't imagine trying to do the same thing all over again, except next time, every step will bring me up progressively higher, to more dangerous heights. I force my head down towards the floor, trying to get my thoughts off the idea.

"Still a little jittery, I see?" Dan says, reaching for some empty glass vials on a shelf. "Don't worry; you've gone through the worst of it. Look on the bright side: with a ward that powerful, there's absolutely no chance that anything else can get down here." He grins.

This fact frustrates me. Rather than comfort me, the idea of the ward surrounding us makes me feel isolated. "Why do you even bother having a ward here if it's just going to freak people out?!" I snap.

"Because..." Dan sighs, while dipping the vials into the water of a cauldron, one by one. "...this is where I store my most valuable projects and supplies, stuff that would take a lot of money and magic to replace."

I nod my head. "I suppose that's a pretty good reason. But still, if you had such a powerful ward up, then why did you bother bringing me down here?"

"I need you here for two reasons. First, I need you here to help me make some potions... potions that will help you. And second, I need to ask you a few questions."

I nod again. I can kind of understand why he'd want my help to make the potions; it may have something to do with how the magic works, or maybe he just needs another set of hands.

But the questions... why would he need to ask me something while we're down in this room? Perhaps there is a magic-related reason for that as well. Or perhaps, Dan needs to speak to me in a place where he can know, for certain, that we're alone. Some place secret.