Sophronia didn't even brush her teeth. She pulled open the book to show Zachary his stats, and for the first time since he'd gotten here, these past few years, these months where he'd been conscious, he wondered if Sophronia knew that he could see these stat updates himself. The numbers appeared in his mind, but she often showed him the pages on the books as if to make sure he knew.

Monstrous House

Class: Daemon

Size: Small Dwelling

Spirit Rank: Bronze (5/5)

Essence: 56/500

Durability: 955/2006

Skills:

Awareness: Bronze (5/5)

Ingestion: Silver (1/5)

Poltergeist: Silver (3/5)

He looked over his numbers at the progress he’d made, but there were more pressing matters. Dead people? In the cellar? He'd gone down there several times to eat all the creatures that tried to hide there and to try and figure out the heating system, but he'd never once gotten a sense of a dead body down there.

Sophronia was in her pajamas, a loose fluffy pink outfit stuffed with feathers to keep her warm. She pulled socks over the pant legs, giving her a comical but cute appearance. Then slipped on a large brown coat. She pulled the hood up, then lifted it to look at Zachary who'd taken to perching on top of her bookshelf. "Let's go," she said in a very quiet voice. "But we can't make a sound okay?"

Zachary turned the knob of her bedroom door and pulled it open as gently as he could. She grinned and slipped out, pausing in front of her parents' bedroom to listen intently. But Zachary could see and feel that they were fast asleep.

It was barely morning. The sun had just come out over the horizon, and his tiles and his walls were still heavy with cold. Sophronia tiptoed across the dining room, but just as Zachary opened the front door, she paused again. Her lips pressed tight. Eyes wide. “Sorry,” she mumbled before about-facing and scurrying to the bathroom.

Fricken kids, thought Zachary. But he paid attention to Haden and Mona, making sure they were still sleeping. When Sophronia came back and put on her boots, he opened the front door and closed it so gently, it didn't make a sound. He even turned the bolt for the lock. With one last check on her parents, Zachary followed Sophronia down the left side of the house.

It was chilly. The grass of his yard was dying, the flowers long since dried out and dead. The bugs buried into the ground to hibernate. No more animals showed up for him to feast on. Once or twice, he thought a deer or a fox came near his backyard area, but his consciousness couldn't properly go there, and Sophronia wouldn't, so he'd had to wait patiently for her to bring him random meals.

She walked up to the small metal doors built into the ground. Zachary turned the bolt and slid it out of place before raising the doors with a creak. This he couldn't help. The hinges were rusty and old, but they revealed dark, damp steps that led into the dark underbelly of the house. Sophronia hesitated at the top, her cheeks pink from the cold, her face set with determination.

“I'm old enough now,” she told herself. At her words, a yellowish-golden aura emanated from her form, outlining her brown coat. Then she took the first step, holding on tightly to the door.

There was a railing, but its nails were rusted through, and it was loose. It nearly came off the wall when Sophronia grabbed it. But Zachary held it firmly in place with his mind and watched carefully that her boot made contact with each step as they were crumbling in several places. Cracks and cobwebs, and before she made it down to the bottom, he used Ingestion, clearing the entire cellar of bugs and things. Sophronia didn't mind spiders so much, but there were little nests of roaches and other beetles, and she especially hated the roaches, and Zachary couldn't blame her.

When she got to the bottom, glowing immensely, Zachary got a much clearer look at the cellar: the dingy wall, the large metallic cylinder that was the water heater, and the assortment of pipes that covered one wall. Each pipe bent in various ways, heading deeper into the earth where he felt them connect with other pipes that led away from him.

Sophronia took careful steps, looking around. Boxes stacked on even more boxes covered the floor. Each one was filled with old clothes and old things. Rugs and blankets, broken dishes and clocks, and there was even a ruined birdhouse. Bugs and things had crawled into every single one of these and made homes. Their old eggs left behind, glistening and gross. The exoskeletons shed by lizards and spiders. The dead with their legs in the air. He couldn't ingest those and he hated the sight of them.

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Sophronia walked away from the water heater and knelt. The ground was paved over. It felt like cement. But it seemed darker in one area and that's where Sophronia was staring. She pointed. “Can you sense them?”

Zachary brought his mind closer, and as he covered over the spot she was staring at, he felt a shudder, like he’d stepped into a cold spot, and the entire house creaked. Sophronia raised her head, eyes wide. “It's okay. They're dead. They can't do anything.”

But then why were you so afraid? he wanted to ask her. That was when he noticed she was shaking, and it wasn't from the cold. She was clenching her teeth.

“Sometimes they talked to me,” she said. “When I was a little girl. That was why I summoned you. I was so scared. I told my parents and they came down here to check but they didn't find anyone. But I knew they were there.”

Focusing on that spot, Zachary brought himself closer and closer to it, trying to feel what was down there. Seeing how far he could go through the ground. But it was as though a barrier repelled him after about an arm’s length into the darkness. Something was down there. Something creepy and cold and disturbing, and Sophronia was definitely right to be afraid of it.

How was something just lying in the ground beneath him all this time? How had he not felt it before?

She rubbed her face and turned away. “My parents felt the coldness, and they said that I should never come down here, but... their voices still come to me sometimes. I know they’re dead. Maybe they’re ghosts. But they’re magic users. Like me.” She swallowed. “I don’t know how many. But they were buried here a long, long time ago, and their spirits got stuck."

Zachary shuddered again. The house creaked in response.

Sophronia looked sad and she stared down at her glowing hands. “I wish I could help them, but I’m not strong enough, and my parents don’t want to bother a big mage to take care of them. They said it’s not safe.”

She looked up at Zachary and sighed heavily. For an instance, she looked much older than an eight-year-old kid should. She looked weathered and tired.

“I need to teach you about Cerulia,” she said. “I don’t understand everything, and Ms. Jezebel won’t tell me much.” She wrinkled her nose and looked down at the spot on the ground again. “But we came here to help you, House. So let’s try this:” She faced the boxes and raised her hand

Light outlined all the boxes and they rattled before shaking free and floating off the ground. Their insides rustled. Dust poured away, and Sophronia sent them spinning around the room, bumping gently into the walls and the steps so that they didn’t make too much noise. With each impact, the vibrations stirred through Zachary and he felt his mind shifting.

Then she walked over to the large cylinder, the water heater. It was a big gray thing, affixed to one wall near the pipes. It was connected to a bunch of pipes, and a steady whirring sound came from it. Every few seconds, it made a metallic clank. “It sounds like it's your heart,” said Sophronia, reaching out with a glowing hand to touch it.

And that was what was missing. Another shudder swept through the entire building. Something big shifted inside Zachary. There was a loud click as his water-heating system activated, and Sophronia stepped back, eyes wide as she tried to suppress a smile.

Awareness: Bronze 5/5 -> Silver 1/5

She pulled the book out of her pocket and flipped through the pages. A grin stretched across her face. She couldn't contain her happiness anymore, and it was an infectious happiness. “Looks like we both got stronger today, House. You hit Silver. And I got over my fear!”

Heat surged through Zachary. He'd felt the pipes before, especially when someone turned the faucet or flushed the toilet, but now he felt every inch of all the pipes woven through his body. Water boiled in the enormous cylinder. He felt it frothing. He felt the steam rising through the pipes, winding through each room above. The pipes were simultaneously his veins and his lungs, and all at once, bubbling and breathy, his presence scattered through the entire house.

It was like someone had zoomed out. He was everywhere, in every part of the house. He was even outside, his consciousness along the walls and windows and on the roof. The chilling fall morning no longer had any effect on him. The sun had risen a bit more, but he didn’t need it now. He was a beacon of warmth all on his own.

But even stranger than this new sensation, he could see. The misty, intangible view he’d once had of the yard and the gate sharpened into incredible clarity. He could see everything clearly now, even the road where cars waited on the curbside. There were cars!

This world wasn’t too different from his own! Excitement bubbled almost as fiercely as the water in the cylinder. He could see the neighboring houses. They were shaped exactly like himself, just as shabby-looking and worn down. He could even see himself from above. He had a bird's eye view of the missing tiles and cracks on his roof. He could even see the backyard now.

It wasn’t really a yard. There was a small section fenced off, and the neighbors had similar fences, but beyond that was a hill that climbed up to a thicket of woods. He couldn’t see into that or beyond it; it was just out of range of his consciousness, and the trees stirred, fading in and out of clarity. But he was suddenly aware of the rabbits that had burrowed into the yard. Rodents and bugs and other things.

Now that Awareness was Silver, he could see so much more, even though Sophronia hadn't walked him through the yard. He could see and feel the dying grass and the fungi growing in his shade and the insects. He waited on using Ingestion; he wanted to relish in this expansion of his senses, and slowly he focused back into the cellar where Sophronia was smiling proudly.

But her smile faded away when a powerful wave of cold emerged from the ground. She whipped around to face that dark spot and Zachary did as well. What the fuck was that? Everything should be warm now. He was heating the entire house. And why did this feel colder than any kind of cold he’d felt before? Even with his increased Awareness, he couldn't sense anything down there.

“A daemon... in the house?” came a hissing, muffled voice. There were other voices too, howling and moaning, like a crowd of ghosts, and Sophronia couldn't help but cry out as she made a beeline for the steps.

Zachary flung the cellar doors open as she raced to the surface. He shut them firmly behind her, and she didn’t even look back as she ran for the front of the house. As soon as he opened the front door, she scrambled inside and into her bedroom, not even bothering to take off her boots before she jumped into her bed and threw a blanket over her head. She was shaking so much. And she’d made so much noise. Her parents emerged from their room in their nightgowns, alarmed and concerned, sleep still heavy on their eyes.

“Soph? Is everything okay?”