The glass passage bucked under his feet like a flexing spine. Each ribbed pane shivered as if the red sky above were striking it with a tuning fork. William ran anyway.
His footsteps came fast while the hallway kept tearing itself apart behind him.
He didn't look back.
Suppressed pings throbbed somewhere under thought like a phone on silent in a jacket pocket. Experience. Kills. Maybe achievements for creative arson. Whatever they were, they could wait.
The last thirty feet went from wobble to free fall. He put both hands out and hit a wooden door like it owed him money. Joints popped. Wood exploded inward. He rode the splinters through—
—into air.
The room beyond dropped three stories onto a mountain of books the size of a small farmhouse. He fell like a bad idea. Then hit like he meant it.
His body took the slide the way a river takes a rock. He rolled with the slope, let the avalanche of spines and paper carry him, caught a stable patch with a palm, pivoted, and came up on his feet at the bottom with only his breath out of place.
His poncho wasn't so lucky.
It tore across the shoulder, then along the side as a hardback tried to make a new door where none belonged. He shrugged it back into position on instinct and clocked the room.
Vaulted ceiling, black metal ribs like a ship flipped over. No windows. One wall carried a vault door taller than a truck, thick as sin, with FORBIDDEN ARCHIVES stenciled above it in letters big enough to read from a bad dream.
Of course it was.
He didn't get to breathe on the thought. The pile behind him shifted. Not like sliding. Like deciding.
He scrambled back as books climbed one another, binding to binding, sewing themselves with invisible ribbon and spirit wire. Covers flexed like plates. Pages flared like gills. A spine turned and locked; a title—Municipal Water Codes, 1947—slid into a gap where a shoulder should be. Arms formed. Legs. A torso, bristling with bookmarked tabs like quills.
Scouting tagged it, the name arriving with the clarity of a label slapped on a jar: Book Golem.
"Oh, hell."
It didn't wait for ceremony. The golem's foot snapped out with all the grace of a pro soccer player and all the mass of a tractor. The kick landed in the center of William's chest.
The world moved. He did, too.
He took the flight badly by any reasonable measure—fifty feet, easy—and met the far wall with enough speed to make stone regret its career choices. Something in his ribs made a noise like a glued joint giving way. He slid to the floor, coughed, and his mouth filled with copper.
He tasted the color anyway. Habit. Stupid habit.
He hauled the blood back into himself with a thought like a reversed pulse and felt small seams in his insides pull tighter. Not perfect. Better. Enough to stand.
No grease left. A fire would have eaten that thing with all the poetry of a burn pile. He regretted every step he'd taken without a resource line for "oil slick plus match."
Sleep was a long shot—but long shots sometimes paid. He threw it anyway, sharp and quiet. The spell slid over the golem like mist over a plow and left it unimpressed.
Poison wouldn't take. Not if anatomy or medicine had taught him anything. This was bound knowledge made mean, not meat.
He needed a heart.
He tugged Detect Magic into being and the room changed. Threads of power traced runes on the vault—deep, deep wards like old tree roots gripping bedrock. The golem lit brighter, a noisy web of bound enchantment. And there, inside its mass, a harder, hotter coil. A core the spell wanted to call a heart.
Getting there was the problem.
A book the size of a mailbox slapped down where his head had been. He dropped, rolled, came up messing with angles. The golem's arms moved like cranes. Its footfalls scooped books into footholds as it stepped. It wasn't a monster; it was a building turning itself into a person for an argument.
He thought about how the brownie had reached into his Item Box like it belonged to him. He thought about how the brownie had known William's status. Familiars were more than pets. They were connected.
"Hey!" William shouted, eyes on the core, lungs drawing fire, mind running faster than the room. "We share spells?"
"Aye!" The voice came from nowhere in particular and everywhere behind him—pebble-thick, pleased. "If ye hold the thought, I'll hold the thread!"
"Do it on my mark!"
He reached into the little sleeve of nowhere and called the last smooth stone. It slid into his palm with familiar weight that felt like promise. He cradled it in the sling; cords lay right without asking. The golem's chest plates shuffled open and closed with every fake breath. He waited for the rhythm. Not slow. Not fast.
He found it.
Then he ran toward the thing that had tried to kick his lungs out and planted.
The release snapped like a whip crack. The stone left the sling's pocket on a line honed by a dozen new instincts and whatever Rhodes had known that soldiers forgot. It flew true, a little star.
The world behind him flickered. The brownie's laugh came, bright and wicked.
"Good."
The stone swelled in the air.
Enchanted stone grew like someone pouring reality into it. The smooth stone became a baseball, then a melon, then a thing that had no business flying at that speed in an enclosed room.
It hit the golem's chest on the syllable of a name that had never been said and kept going.
Books exploded outward in a tide of shrapnel. Pages shredded into a paper blizzard. The boulder punched through the coil at the golem's center and took half the back with it, continuing until it met the far pile and embedded itself in knowledge like a meteor fallen into a paperback field.
The core choked. The light inside it guttered and went out.
The golem stumbled forward two steps because physics forgot to read the memo, then collapsed in a sound like a library falling downstairs. The wave of books it released rolled out in a heavy sigh and settled against William's boots like surf.
Silence gathered, butter-knife thin.
He stood there, chest hitching, arm tingling from the throw in a way that made his humerus think about retirement. The last shreds of red light from the skylight had no glass here; the vault room's glow came from glowing crystals set in chained cages overhead. His ragged poncho hung like something a scarecrow wouldn't take for free.
A shape pulled itself out from behind a fallen dictionary the size of a toddler. The brownie hopped up onto a busted crate and doffed the monstrous mushroom hat with a courtly bow.
"Ye pitch fair," he said, eyes crinkled, accent as thick as river mud. "and I don't mind sayin' I like yer style."
William laughed once—short, involuntary, a hiccup of relief. Then winced, because ribs. "Thanks for the assist."
"Aye. We're a team now, aye? Ye think sharp; I tie the threads."
He nodded and let the adrenaline shake run down into his shoes where it could do no harm. The suppressed pings jostled at the edge of thought, louder now that a thing made of a hundred million pages had stopped trying to redecorate his thoracic cavity.
He'd fed the system blood, fire, and madness. It had counted every drop.
Now came the audit — and the upgrades. Time to see just how much his meter had spinned.