She is good at that.
Forty five minutes later, Eileen begins to wonder. Not fret, mind you, just wonder, when exactly the fluffy tumblers might tire themselves out.
She had been stone cold certain they’d be exhausted by now. As sure as sunrises and sore knees. And yet, here she sits. Waiting and watching them in their ceaseless, spiraling pattern with the patient dismay of someone who once spent an entire afternoon trying to get a sugar dizzy toddler out of a papier-maché dragon costume.
They were at it again. The three fluffy tumblers were dashing for the door in a tangle of fur and determination. Their paws slapping the stone, ears bouncing with every lurching step, and for a breath, just a breath, it almost seems like they’ll make it.
But then comes the sound. Clack clack clack, followed by a thud.
The wheel behind them spins back. The door slams shut and the cycle resets again.
One tumbler skids across the floor with a wheeze, crashes into the wall, then rights itself with the dazed dignity of a creature who refuses to admit it's dizzy. It trots back to the wheel as though this had been the plan all along. Eileen still watches, head tilted.
The other tumbler attempts what can only be described as a somersault of protest, leaping high into the air and landing in a defeated pile of limbs and fluff. Within moments, it’s back on its paws, barking complicated instructions to no one in particular. Possibly the wall, which does not answer.
The first is then at it again. It spins so enthusiastically that it topples, paws flailing, then recovers without a hint of shame, as if failure were merely a type of dance. "Poor dears," she murmurs, "still running like they’ll disappear if they stop."
She doesn’t say it unkindly. It’s the kind of observation one makes about children too long confined to silence, or little ones who mistook obedience for worth. The tumblers don’t need discipline. They need someone to notice when they’re trying too hard. So she waits for them. Not just to fix the door, but to give them time to come down from whatever old performance they haven’t realized is over yet.
Meanwhile, the smallest tumbler has, for reasons known only to it, begun dragging a length of ribbon it found in the corner and whipping it about like a war banner. None of it helps the door, though. None of it slows the cycle. But Eileen? She smiles.
Even with the wait, she still cannot quite find it in herself to be a grumpy gus about the whole thing. Not honestly. In fact if she’s was truthful, and she feels she tries to be, especially with herself, the discomfort in her legs is less their fault and more her own. She hadn’t followed the healer’s advice, not properly. Not since the fall equinox either, if she’s being even more truthful.
And now her knees feel like someone tried to fold them the wrong way and forgot to unfold them again. So to blame the tumblers for their vigor and youth would be downright improper, ungracious, even. They are clearly just working something out. "This," she mutters under her breath, "is what comes from unsupervised sugar."
The thought settles. Then stirs something else, nudging her to glance around the room. She looks toward toppled desks, the broken gear housing, the tangled mess of chain across the floor like a pile of old jewelry too tarnished to sort. "Well," she murmurs, "I have the time. Might as well do something useful."
She presses her palms to the wall and rises with a grunt. Not as fast as she once did, but with enough steadiness that her shawl stays put. Her knees creak in protest, a long, mournful sort of sound, like a door hinge in a house that no longer gets visitors.
The wall is cold, comfortingly so. Like an old countertop that’s seen flour and elbows and better years. She starts with simple leg lifts, one at a time, slow and sure, holding each to the count of ten. "Don’t bounce," she reminds herself. "Smooth and steady. No shortcuts, just the way the healer showed me."
The healer’s voice floats up uninvited, dry as chamomile left too long in the cup. "If you’re going to be old, Eileen, be old on purpose."
She can’t remember if he smiled when he said it. Probably not, he was the sort who frowned politely, like it was a courtesy. She snorts at the memory and lifts her other leg. The room around her, part of this dungeon mentioned by Williams seems to hush around her. Not go still, exactly, but listen. The air holds itself a little differently. The chain controlling the door doesn’t clatter quite so much and one of the fluffy tumblers slows briefly, then resumes without reason.
Next, standing knee extensions. She turns to brace her back against the wall, hands out for balance, lifting each foot forward in turn. Her thighs hum and her breath finds a rhythm. There’s something almost ceremonial in it. Not magic, not quite, just a sense of care repeated.
Finally, ankle circles. Awkward, yes, always have been, but never the less crucial. She crosses her legs and makes slow rotations, clockwise, then counterclockwise, even as her joints protest like old friends gossiping on a porch swing. "Better..." She lets herself breathe, not triumphant, just taller.
"Still got it," she says under her breath, and though no one applauds, the walls of this room do feel warmer beneath her palms.
Because again, exercises do help, even when she does not want to admit it. Her legs feel less like firewood and more like legs again, which is as much as anyone can ask at her age.
Turning back Eileen finds the fluffy tumblers haven’t slowed. If anything, they’ve seem to have gotten more dramatic. One has started pirouetting in between surges at the wheel, and another appears to be barking instructions at an empty helmet lying on the floor. The helmet helping her to really look at the wreckage.
She squints at the mess scattered across the room toppled chairs, smashed crates, a half buried cabinet missing its drawers. “Surely,” she says aloud, “someone left something helpful lying around.”
And then the thought arrives, not like thunder, but like a note tucked in a coat pocket she didn’t remember wearing. They must have a map. It makes sense to her, in the soft, warm way that certain things do. They’ve been darting and dashing in the same pattern. Maybe its not random, maybe it wasn't chaos. Just purpose she doesn’t understand yet.
She taps her chin. “Well, if I were a map, I’d be buried under something stubborn.”
Her eyes land on the broken haft of a broom, splintered at one end, but straight and balanced. She picks it up, testing the weight in her hand. Solid, slightly warm and it reminds her of the old baton she used once during her childhood to direct the harvest parade, back when she lived in a home. Plus, she’d only tripped over the tuba section once.
She gives the handle a little twirl and nods. “This’ll do.” And with that, she begins.
She starts with the nearest pile, a mound of broken chair legs and what might once have been a table, though now it more closely resembles a wooden octopus that lost a fight with gravity. “All right, you,” she mutters, giving it a poke with the broom handle. “Let’s see what secrets you’re sitting on.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
The dutiful search continues for the next ten minutes until Eileen finds herself leaning briefly on the broom handle, breath steady, even as her thoughts flicker at the edges. She glances toward the fluffy tumblers, still spinning themselves in wild little circles, and lets the silence around her settle into something that feels suspiciously like self doubt.
“What if I’m dawdling?” she murmurs. Not accusing herself, just inquiring. The way you might test a pie’s doneness, not because it’s wrong, but because you want to be sure. “What if this isn’t the right kind of useful?”
But then the chain shudders again, a wheel slips, and a tiny paw fails gloriously at coordination, tumbling backward into a convoluted heap of limbs. She sighs softly. “Well,” she says, brushing dust from her knees, “there’s useful... and there’s what actually needs doing.”
Eileen continues and dust continues to puff up in small, offended clouds around her. Clouds that she keeps waving off with her shawl until something catches her eye. She kneels to investigate, like she’s waking someone from a long, unplanned nap. But beneath the splinters, she finds nothing. So she tidies a stray bolt back into place, because even chaos deserves a little order.
Next, a collapsed shelving unit, the metal twisted like a pretzel left too close to a forge. Eileen frowns at it, leans in for a better look, then raps the side twice with her broom. “No thank you,” she says, and moves on.
The third pile smells faintly of peppermint and burned cloth. A desk, maybe, or a cabinet. It is impossible to tell now, charred as it is. But buried beneath it all is a single child’s shoe, no laces, scuffed near the toe.
She picks it up, weighs it in her palm like a memory. “Someone small left in a hurry,” she murmurs. Then she sets it gently atop the pile and keeps going.
The fourth heap is mostly paper, torn files, official looking documents, a folder labeled “DO NOT ARCHIVE” in six different fonts. She skims the first few pages. One is entirely filled with the word “sacrifice” written over and over again in spiraling lines until it forms a flower. “Well, that’s unsettling,” she says, and nudges it back into the heap.
Finally, the fifth pile. An old cot snapped in half like a wishbone, its mattress gutted, springs rusted through. She pokes underneath, carefully, and there it is. Two flashes of yellow, nearly hidden beneath a bar bent into a sleepy U.
She finds two small wooden wedges, angular and crisp. Painted the yellow of overripe lemons. Not furniture, not junk, just doorstops, or something very much like them.
Eileen smiles but not the wide kind she would give to little ones. The small, satisfied one she keeps for herself. The kind that belongs to someone who has found exactly what she was hoping for, even if she did not know she was hoping yet. She sets her basket down and crouches low, one hand on her knee, and scoops up the wedges with a grunt. One in each hand, triumphant offerings to be sure.
Across the room she pads, careful not to trip on loose chain or stray pieces of ritual nonsense. Another door looms ahead, tall, iron jawed, and crowned with a heavy portcullis that has not budged in all her time here. It has simply sat there, suspended in disapproval, as if waiting for someone to earn passage the proper way.
Now, though, it pulses faintly at the seams as if ready. Or maybe just a little less reluctant to keep itself anchored to the room.
The fluffy tumblers surge again, squealing with effort as they haul the great wheel into motion. The chains rattle, the door groans open, an inch, maybe two, and the moment one of them bolts for it, the wheel slips. It spins back. It slams shut.
Again.
She watches this twice more. Then a third time, then tilts her head. “Poor coordination,” she says. “But impressive morale despite the continued challenges, they should be proud of their endurance, of running the gauntlet this long.”
And then, without fuss, she kneels at the base of the door and slides the wedges into place, one beneath each side, precise as pie crust corners. The floors stone is cold under her fingers, but the wedges feel just slightly warm. Not hot or magical, just quietly expectant, like they have been waiting for someone practical to make use of them.
She nudges each one with the side of her boot. A little here. A little there.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
The wedges slide into place, with a soft final thunk, just where the stone pavers dip slightly into the floor. Eileen nudges them again with her boot for assurance, careful and deliberate, like setting corners on a tablecloth before the guests arrive.
“It’s always the little things,” she says, more to the air than anyone else. “Sometimes you just have to brace life with a bit of stone to remind everything else how to stay up.”
She thinks then of Audry and Ollan. Of how their beds had been remade for children not expected to survive. Of honey bread given in place of the carefully placed stones of commitment one gives to another to remind those you hold dear that you would always stand beside them. And how even then, the smallest acts, rolled socks, names remembered, could end up keeping a space from collapsing in on itself when one forgets about the stones. “Even a door can learn to stay open,” she says. “If someone simply shows it how.”
The fluffy tumblers pause mid loop, one hanging from a low chain like a bat trying to remember gravity. They blink in unison, look at the door. Then, squealing with joy, they charge together.
This time, they make it.
They spill through in a flurry of fur, limbs, and delighted yips, yowling praise into the corridor like toddlers released from a too long ceremony. Eileen, smiling, steps aside just in time to avoid being flattened. One fluffy tumbler loops around her skirt like it is blessing her hem. Another tries to hand her the ribbon it has been dragging for half an hour. She takes it, it is a gift given in gratitude, why would she not.
As the last fluffy tumbler yips across the threshold, something in the walls exhales. The chains once supporting the door run slack. The air grows warmer not by temperature, but in the way a forgotten hearth remembers fire. On the floor near the old cot, one glyph flickers once, then creases into itself, like a sigh being documented.
In the far corner, a rusted sconce glows momentarily brighter. The plaque beside it flickering with ghost like text, barely legible before it fades:
Soft system pulse registered: Threshold Stabilized
+1 Brown Mote: Manual Intervention Honored
System Query: “Why does simplicity work?”
The room stills. The chains now quiet, the wheel no longer groans. The gears, for once, do not reset.
Looking around Eileen now finds the walls are etched with faint concentric sigils, faded from age, but deliberate. Checkmarks or instructions, something circular and sacred. She even notices a stone podium in the corner which hums slightly, as if it remembers paperwork. A copper sconce near the door flickers like a clock with nothing to count.
She realizes it with a quiet certainty. This is a guardhouse, not for battle but for function even if she did not understand for what.
System Function Identified: Substation for Obedience Verification
System Query: Can unscheduled behaviors be emulated?
Something was meant to be stopped here, or held or verified. And whatever it was built for, it could not function until someone helped the fluffy tumblers do their job. Eileen rubs her hands together, then dusts her palms against her shawl. “Well then,” she says to the room, “I suppose that’s sorted.”
Eileen straightens and picks up her basket, now slightly ribbon decorated, and turns toward the only exit, an arched hallway framed in dark stone, the heavy portcullis mysteriously absent.
And that is when she sees it, tucked absurdly on a velvet cushion, halfway between pomp and prank, rests a single platinum key, gleaming, precise, and clearly enchanted. It dangles from a ribbon the color of the ocean at midnight, the kind you only see in dreams or dye accidents.
A plaque beneath reads:
For VIPs Only! No Exceptions!
Eileen tilts her head and the ribbon shifts but only slightly. Then as if caught in a draft she cannot feel or as if it is reaching for her, she finds herself stepping closer. For the key gives off a faint, humming warmth. Not hot, just familiar. Like the feeling of putting your hand on a fresh loaf of bread still in its pan.
She picks it up.
The ribbon slips willingly into her fingers. Not silky, more like the texture of an old choir sash, slightly frayed at the edges and it coils softly against her wrist, like a cat’s tail. Or a very small, very polite eel wanting to be pet.
Eileen reads the plaque again. “VIPs,” she repeats aloud. “Very Important Persons.”
Blue smoke letters curl lazily into view,
VIP Status Confirmed! Thank you for your patience.
She snorts. “Someone’s clearly never worked at a church fundraiser.”
Still, she does not put it down. She tucks the key instead into the folds of her clothing. Not reverently, but with care, like one might tuck a note for later or a pair of gloves too good to lose.
But as she tucks the ribboned VIP pass away, something shifts beneath her feet. Not stone, but story. A thread added to a tapestry that did not know it was missing color. In readiness, not reverence.