The tower’s interior was no improvement over its exterior. Within it was cold, cramped, and leaky. The ground was stone and without any rugs or carpets, and even through his shoes, walking hurt Corvo’s feet.

Mother made him wait on the ground floor. A ruined table had a few chairs around it. Corvo’s held strong when he sat down, but Dorian’s cracked; the support beam snapped, and the seat fell out from under him.

The old man swore as Corvo laughed. He decided to lean against a wall instead.

The enthralled goblin cleaned up the body of her slain companion. Corvo caught a single glimpse of a limp hand dragged down the stairs. But that was all.

Dead things were not his concern. He was more alarmed by the moldy smell in his nose.

Mother snapped her fingers and lit a fire in a stove. A small kitchen was beside the table.

“I’m cold,” Corvo said.

“It will warm,” Mother said.

“It smells,” Corvo said.

“Do not complain,” Mother said. “We will deal with the smell.”

“He’s right,” Dorian said. He lit a torch. “There were bats in here. It’s guano. And more.”

“What’s guano?” Corvo asked

“Bat shit,” he said.

Mother glared at him, but the two said nothing else. Dorian brought in their saddlebags, and despite the smell, the three ate together in silence. The goblin’s voice had startled him at first, but not scared him; yet this place, with shadows everywhere, was different. He felt like something would emerge from the dark and attack him at any moment. He missed Castle Erod.

The goblin returned an hour later. Her hands were covered in dirt, and her eyes still glowed blue.

“Begin cleaning this room,” Mother instructed. “Dorian, stay with him. I need to examine the library more closely. If these goblins were drawn to it, ‘tis a good sign that the scrolls within still have magic, and that the ancient enchantments protecting them still hold.”

Dorian nodded. “Watch your step.”

The staircase snaked around the edge of the tower. To the left of the front entrance, the steps disappeared into the walls.

They creaked as Mother ascended.

Corvo watched her go longingly. He hated it when she left. But he understood that he was too young to face the danger she often did, and so he had to wait in the smelly kitchen for a while yet.

Dorian sat down beside him. Around them, the goblin began tidying what it could, picking up fallen boards or bricks and removing them outside. She was a clumsy creature, though, and couldn’t do much more than that.

Corvo watched her. He was very tired, even though it was still day, and he yawned. But a moment later he straightened in his chair.

“Gob,” he pronounced.

Dorian stared at him. “Gob,” he echoed.

“That’s her name.”

“Gob the Goblin.”

Corvo nodded vigorously.

“Is that a girl’s name?” Dorian said.

“It’s a goblin name,” Corvo said.

“I didn’t know goblins had names.” The old man’s voice was rough but had a playful edge.

“Everything has names,” Corvo said. “I’m Corvo. You’re Dorian. Mother is Eris. She’s Gob.”

“Everything has names, true,” Dorian said, “but maybe we should choose something more distinctive. What if we find another goblin? What would we call him, if Gob is taken?”

Corvo gave this some serious thought.

“Gobby,” he said;

Dorian laughed. “I’m not so sure she’s a pet to be named. She must have a name already.”

Corvo shrugged. But Dorian snapped his fingers and called the creature over.

“Stop that,” he commanded. “Come here. Can you understand me now?”

Gob stared blanky ahead. Then, slowly, she nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“I am Gob,” the goblin said. She spoke Kathar as poorly as she had spoken Regal. Her mouth opened and shut in jerky, jolting movements like a chewing nutcracker.

“You overheard us,” Dorian said.

She nodded.

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“What was your name before today?”

Gob said something unintelligible, in a language that sounded like the squeaking of drowning rats. Corvo flinched in his seat. But he realized that the creature was obedient and sat upright. A smile formed on his lips.

“Touch your nose!” he said.

Gob reached out and touched her sunken skull-like nose with her left hand.

“Stand on one leg!”

The goblin obeyed. She fell over instantly, with no sense of balance, and tried to stand back up to do it again.

“Stop it,” Dorian said. “Stand normally. You’ll hurt it, chicklet. She isn’t a toy.”

Gob didn’t seem to listen, for she went to follow Corvo’s last order again. But Corvo agreed, and he told her to stand normally.

“Tell a joke,” he said then.

Gob opened her mouth. Slowly she spoke:

“I start at fingers. I peel them away with the carving knife. Witch’s fingers are best of all. I chop. I drink the mana from its blood—”

Dorian stood and hit the goblin in the head. It fell to the ground.

“Is that your idea of a joke?” he said. “You talk that way to a child? Sick creature. I should kill you now. Nothing good will come from keeping you around.”

Mother appeared on the steps.

“It is a goblin,” she said. “To it, cannibalism is amusing. I do not know what you expected. Return to cleaning, creature.” She looked to Corvo. “Do not tease her any more. She is a servant, not a friend.”

“Yes, mother,” Corvo said.

“Good. Now, the library is set. There is everything I thought, and an impressive laboratory. We will stay here for as long as we can.”

Dorian nodded. With that, they set about cleaning.

The tower had five floors. The lowest was the basement. Cramped and lit by magelights, countless boxes and barrels were stacked for storage, and a hatch led to a spring and a well. On the second day Mother performed a ritual at the spring to purify it and make sure the water was safe to drink. The boxes contained blankets and pillows, with a slight odor, that Mother also quickly cleaned with a spell.

They still never smelled quite right.

Corvo avoided the basement at all costs. The shadows seemed to move down there. He did not like it.

The ground floor was the kitchen. Gob and Dorian worked together for two days to clean it up. The dust and cobwebs were cleared away, and the ruined shelves and crumbling walls were patched over as best as could be managed in this remote place. Corvo mostly sat idle while the others worked. The strange sweet smell of “guano” faded, but twice he and Dorian had to chase away bats that came in at dusk through the now-missing front door.

The third time they tried running the bats out, Mother came down the stairs. She sighed when she saw Dorian, the wizened adventurer, chasing a flying rodent about a circle with a broom.

She waved her hand. The bats all stopped mid-air.

Their brown skin became gray.

Ash rained to the ground.

“There,” she said. “You will find them easier to sweep up this way.”

Dorian put the broom aside. “If you can do that to them, can’t you clean this place up with a spell? And why not build us a new door?”

“I can’t, you are right. I could if I knew a spell of Portal Construction, or Rubbish Sweeping, but neither are in my repertoire.”

“But Pest Control is,” Dorian said.

“For most pests, yes. Why do you complain? Make the goblin do it. I spared her for a reason.”

So Dorian did make the goblin do it, and the bats troubled them no more.

The second floor held the bedrooms. There were four, two large and two very small, and Mother insisted that Corvo take the second large room for himself.

“You are old enough to have your own room,” she said. “I will never be more than a knock on the door away.”

Corvo did not like this idea. Over the coming nights, he would always sneak out after dark to climb back into Mother’s bed. For his entire life, with few exceptions, they had slept near each other. He wasn’t comfortable alone.

But each night Mother’s door was locked. He would return to his room, defeated, and terrified about the monsters he felt sure lived beneath his bed. He swore that the shadows moved in his bedroom, late at night, writhing along the walls.

“I don’t like it in there,” he whispered to her one morning at breakfast. “There’s a monster in the dark.”

Another parent might have brushed aside these suspicions. But Mother investigated the four rooms thoroughly, checking beneath each bed and in every closet.

She sat down with him.

“Sometimes the dark can be frightening,” she said. “But you will grow accustomed to it before long. A grown boy does not mind shadows; shadows cannot harm him.”

Corvo nodded along. But when next he tried to fall asleep alone, he still saw the walls quivering in the dark. He knew he heard the monster giggling under his bed.

It took an hour to build the courage to sprint for the door and find Mother. He yelled for her and knocked to wake her up. When her door opened, he saw Dorian behind her, in her bed, but she closed it quickly behind her again.

She investigated. She conjured a light in her hand and checked every corner of the room. But there was never anything there.

“There is no monster, my little crow,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

It was the space between the second and third floor that the adventurous tree had poked through the tower’s walls. It had smashed through a window along the staircase to reach out for the sun again with its branches. The trunk blocked the steps, and Corvo had to crawl beneath it if he wanted to go higher up in the tower. Dorian and Mother simply climbed over it.

The third floor was the library. The curved walls were wrapped in shelves of books. To Corvo the stacks seemed a hundred feet tall. Mother spent nearly all of her time sifting through the spines for the first two weeks. She would use a spell and collect a few at a time, saying, “These are the ones which bear enchantments. You may read the others, but never touch these,” before placing them out of reach.

Corvo had been taught to read before his third birthday. He was thrilled to be back someplace with books, and in his endless free time he chose random tomes off the lower shelves, from Procreative Habits of Lesser Aethereal Entities to Pulmonology of the Elves. There was no fiction and nothing he really understood, but a few of the books had illuminations, and those he loved. One in particular showed the interior of an ancient Old Kingdom sailing ship; he spent hours staring at it, imagining what it would be like to live in a city atop the sea.

“Can he read that himself?” he heard Dorian ask one night, while they were together in the library.

“He can,” Mother said. “Is that surprising?”

“I couldn’t read until I was ten,” Dorian said. “And a book like that one he’s holding would still put me to sleep.”

“Children have powerful imaginations. They will entertain themselves with rocks, if you leave them be.”

Corvo looked up at her. She smiled back.

“No one tried to teach me to read until I was eight,” she continued. “Yet I picked it up quickly. I wanted to make sure my son would not need to wait so long.”

“We should get him some better books,” Dorian said. He climbed over the branch on the staircase and ascended out of view. “Something with dragons.”

Mother followed him. “I will do no such thing!”

The fourth and final floor of the tower was the arcane sanctum. The laboratory. Mother spent most of her time there once the library was sorted, occasionally with Dorian, and Corvo was not permitted inside. He wondered what it looked like, what she did there for so many long nights, but asking was pointless; she would never tell him. He was content enough in the library instead—but he hated being left anywhere alone. Wind howled through the broken windows. The moon cast long shadows from the holes in the walls, and in the darkest places, even though they never approached or harmed him, Corvo was certain monsters lurked.

If he had known how right he was, he never would have let Mother leave his side.