She looked into empty rooms, one after the other.
They had the look of castle rooms, with grand beds, cupboards, chandeliers of clear glass hanging from the ceilings, and tall mirrors.
But no windows. None of them had even one.
She passed through more than one courtyard and hallways that seemed to stretch endlessly through the mountain.
There were many of them, built almost haphazardly, built simply to be built. The craftsmanship was excellent, but it seemed that those who built it hadn't communicated with one another, so that many spaces a castle should have were duplicated and overlapped.
It wasn't so much a labyrinth as… something she didn't know how to describe.
It made sense and no sense at the same time, and she had to get used to it.
She went through more rooms, through banquet halls, bathrooms, kitchens, what seemed like storerooms, though there was nothing in them; no food or anything of the like.
As strange as this place was, she dismissed the thought.
Not eating should have been weird, but seeing how little she ate herself, she wasn't one to judge.
And there was water. Though she didn't eat a lot, she drank far more often. Still far less than a normal human, but she did drink.
The castle did not change as she went deeper.
Rooms repeated themselves with slight variations; another bedchamber, another hall with a long table and many chairs, another bathroom with empty stone tubs. Some spaces were grand enough to host dozens; others were narrow and almost private, tucked between corridors as though someone had decided, at the last moment, that a room should exist there.
The dust-creature drifted ahead and back, unbothered by the repetition.
Sonder thought that she should maybe mark her path, but she decided against it.
Scratching walls, the ground, or putting things out of place was a rude thing to do when inside someone else's home.
She wasn't sure if this was an evil place, so she didn't want to intrude too much.
And it seemed that people did live here; she had seen a few more knights since arriving.
Even at this moment, she heard footsteps again. A measured tread, unconcerned. A pair of dark knights moved somewhere close to her, their presence more heard than seen.
They did not come for her. They never did.
Sonder stepped back for a moment, lost in thought.
The castle, or castles, were big, but no castle was infinite. For all its strangeness, it obeyed certain expectations.
A castle, no matter how warped, was still built with a purpose.
She had seen sleeping chambers enough for a small court, banquet halls that could host feasts, kitchens meant to feed many, baths and storerooms and courtyards layered on top of one another as if excess itself had been the goal. She had seen places for servants, for guards, for guests who might arrive.
She had seen everything that supported rule itself.
But no ruler.
There was no throne room. Not even one.
A lord who commanded riders and dragons, who ruled land so thoroughly that instinct turned travelers away, would not lack a throne; a seat of power.
Even if the castle was not a home, even if it was a monument or a fortress or something stranger still, there would be a place where authority gathered and settled.
And she had not found it.