Chapter 19: Chapter 19: The tower is a dangerous place to be. But outside of the tower is also a dangerous place

“What it’s like to be down that deep in a dungeon?” he asks me, narrowing his eyes. “I’ll tell you what it’s like to be down that deep in a dungeon.” His hands rise up and grasp my neck.

I lift a hand, gesturing for my secretary to continue transcribing the scene and for the guards to stand back.

“It starts off like this. Not so bad, right?” he asks. “Sure, it’s a little uncomfortable, being on floor one, but we expect that, don’t we?”

I nod.

His fingers squeeze my throat tighter.

“It isn’t just that the dungeon is a place that gets more difficult as you go deeper into it,” he explains, staring into my eyes. I notice that he has not blinked yet. “It’s not just that there are bigger rooms or bigger monsters, no…”

He leans in towards me. His breath smells of lavender smoke.

“— It knows. It’s alive.”

His fingers squeeze tighter around my neck. I maintain my composure, but my throat lets out a reflexive squelch as he compresses his grip. I feel my face turning red and flush.

“It can feel you walking around inside of it, the dungeon,” he says. “Like a worm, wiggling in your guts. It can feel you and it hates you for being there. The deeper you go, the angrier it gets.”

My vision at this point becomes blurry.

The guards step forward, but I lift my hand again, stopping them.

“By the time you get to floor thirty, you’re not just some nuisance. You’re an active problem and it knows you’re there. It can feel you, it can watch you and it does. It does, with eyes that you can’t see.” He leans in. “They’re in the walls, you know? The eyes.”

He squeezes tighter. My vision fades and my arms tremble. I undertake great effort to stop my body from instinctively fighting back to free myself.

“— And then, when it notices you, then the rules change. Things change. The walls, the floors, the patterns. It’s like you can feel it, smashing a fist against its belly over and over so that it can kill you from the outside and shit you out.”

He lets go.

I gasp for air, clutching my throat. My vision is filled with stars and I feel deeply light-headed and nauseous.

The man looks down at his hands, bound in shackles. “…You’re never alone,” he says, holding himself. “You’re never alone. Don’t ever trust the walls,” he says, stroking the wall of his cell. “It's inside of them.”