It was time to start— Abor jutted up from his sitting position and looked around the room. Bare. Dead. But not for long.

Turn and twists, that was how he did it: a flick of his wrist, and the floorings morphed; a firm pointing of his finger and that was all it took for furniture to phase into reality. Every tousle and movement resulted in a new part of his home being remade and it didn’t take long before the once gloomy chamber was given a more respectable air of eloquence.

Truthfully, however, even such a mild-mannered makeover of the place was not enough. There needed to be more.

And there would be, for this was just the first step.

As Abor room by room and hallway by hallway remade his tower in the image of himself, he thought of everything to make it truly his home— traps and weapons included: spiky walls, of course; flamethrowers in the halls? Obviously; and from the arcane dust in this place, he made golems into his own private defense force.

But after a while in designing his fortress, Abor stopped and thought to himself, “what would I need an army for? Who would attack me here?” And he felt silly with himself. Possessing an army, after all, was besides his objectives— he had let childishness get in the way of his real goal: expanding his tower.

Going to each of the golems he made, Abor touched each with a spot of magic. And just as he thought they would, they then went off into the endless staircase and forever stretching hallways spreading his image of what this place should be; as the golems did so, the tower changed, as it changed into what Abor demanded it change into: perfect, sleek, peaceful.

Abor would still have his army, but it would be an industrial army dedicated to his glorious future. His glorious . . . home. His family. He and his mother. Living safely and perfectly in their own constructed heaven. Forever.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

All through the profound place, everything was still.

Rats. Dust. Bones. Heartache. The buried secrets deep within the gravel and rot, those legacies of sorrow and passion. The stilted air.

It never left, those things. They remained. Soft and understanding. Buried. But still there.

In their place was a monument anew. A call to the departed without a place.

And in the center of this monument, was Abor.

“I knew you would come. One day,” the voice of a stranger said to Abor as he meditated in his ghostly room.

But Abor did not turn his head to look. He wasn’t sure the person was real. Fifty-fifty, at least.

“You know me?” Abor replied, half invested.

“No. But I saw you. Very brave, might I add, milord; you waddled into this citadel of rot and did something with it. I thought you would have died.”

“Well, I didn’t. Sorry to disappoint.”

A silence.

“You are not a disappointment, Abor. Not to your mother . . .”

“But— w-what . . .”

“She was sick. Not well in the brain. She didn’t know what she was talking about. It was an accident. Don’t blame—”

“SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUDDUP-SHUDDUP!”

More silence. And more.

And then the stranger left.

Abor opened his eyes.

The room was cold, but it was quickly warming back up. Ghost body parts frittered in and out of vision. But there was no stranger. Abor had been alone as he ever was, here.

But someone had been here— Abor knew someone had when he saw on the floor something that had not been there before. A tiny, plastic, reflective card. The card only said, “F: Null.”

Abor slipped the unusual card into his pocket.

“I need to get back to my mother. She needs me,” Abor said to himself and the ghosts. “She really needs me.”

Using his magical energies, Abor allowed himself to float back to his magician’s circle. Using his muscles— even the thought of it— just drained him so. He scooped up his grimoire and read and read and read. Would he find something new to help him? New content often appeared in the book even though he had been certain previously that he knew the book cover-to-cover. It was an intriguing book being all like that.

He found content and then some. He found the way.

This was good because it was at that moment that Abor found his magical reserves depleting. Evidently, hosting a small army of robots which systematically transformed a hidden reality into your own playground, drained a lot. Abor knew he needed a bigger score— something more lasting than dozens of siphon traps.

Time past. He studied the book and it, in turn, studied him; and, for a time, the machines of Abor’s new domain went quiet as the witch to be plotted his biggest and brightest scheme yet to bring happiness to his life.