Shade came to collect on the third morning after the city rose.
I was in the new workshop, halfway into a guardian knight's shoulder joint, when I felt someone standing in the doorway. Nobody had made a sound. That's how I knew who it was.
"Morning, Shade."
She walked in and held out a small square of paper. On it, in very neat handwriting, was one word.
Day 1.
"You've been saving that a while, huh?"
She nodded once.
"Okay. Three days of endless head pats, redeemable any time. I'm a man of my word." I pointed my chisel at the bench beside me. "I'm in the middle of something, though. Is this okay?"
She sat down on the bench, close enough that her shoulder touched my arm, and tilted her head toward me a fraction of an inch. That was apparently the whole request.
So I worked one-handed for the rest of the day.
It was harder than it sounds. Sculpting a shoulder joint one-handed is a special kind of misery. But every time I stopped patting her to pick up a file, Shade's eyes would go dim, like a lamp turned down. When I started again, they'd come right back up. After the third time, I stopped picking up the file.
The guardian knight came out normal. I've never been prouder of a normal golem.
Day 2 was a training day.
Shade led me down to the lower city, where the new assassin golems drilled. There were about forty of them by then, all masked, all very quiet, standing in neat rows while their teacher walked between them correcting stances with two fingers.
She didn't say a word the whole morning. She didn't have to. She'd tap a shoulder, and the golem would drop it half an inch. She'd touch an elbow, and a whole arm would rotate into place. The new golems watched her the way my swordsmen watch Piaro.
At lunch she came back, sat beside me on the low wall where I'd been watching, and tilted her head again. I patted. The whole class of forty assassins watched their terrifying teacher close her eyes like a cat in a sunbeam.
One of them, a rare one, made a tiny noise. It might have been a laugh.
Shade opened one eye.
The noise stopped. Very permanently.
Day 3 she didn't bring a slip of paper. She just showed up at the end of the day, after the last of the hunting teams came home, and sat with me on the castle steps while the city lights came on below us.
I patted her head for a long time. Long enough that the street lanterns all finished lighting, and the goblin miners' shift whistle blew, and Juliet yelled goodnight to the whole city from her tower window, and the whole city yelled goodnight back.
Then Shade spoke. It was the most I'd ever heard her say.
"When you made me, you thought about the eagles. Watching. Waiting. Coming home." She looked at the city. "I watch. I wait. I come home."
I didn't trust my voice for a second, so I just kept patting her head.
"Thank you, Master," she said. "That's all. I'm done."
"You've still got a few hours left on day three."
Her face didn't change. Her eyes did something complicated and smug.
"Then I'm not done."
I laughed so hard I almost fell off the step.
The next morning Fenrir woke me up by sitting on my chest in his kid form and staring at me until I opened my eyes. That's not unusual. What was unusual was that Gladius was standing at the foot of the bed, too, practically vibrating.
"Father," Fenrir said. "One of the swordsmen broke through."
"To epic?"
"To unique."
I sat up so fast Fenrir rolled off me.
She was waiting in the castle training yard, surrounded by every swordsman golem I owned. She'd been one of the original ten. A normal golem with a normal class, one of the plain androgynous faces I made back when I was rationing my effort. She didn't look plain anymore. Her hair had come in long and iron-gray, her features had sharpened, and she held her sword the way Piaro holds his: like it had been part of her arm the whole time.
[A golem has broken through to a unique-rated class.]
[Class: Swordmaiden of the Iron Wood (Unique)]
"She trained with me more than anyone," Fenrir said quietly. "And she watched Sir Piaro more than anyone. Even me."
He said it the way you'd say something about the weather. His tail was doing something completely different.
The swordswoman went to one knee. "Father of all golems. I ask for nothing. I only wanted you to see."
"Stand up," I said. "You broke through to unique from a normal class. That's a name. That's the rule." I thought about it for a moment. About iron-gray hair and a class that the system had named after a forest. About the old stories where the forest of iron trees is where all of Fenrir's kin were born.
"Jarn," I said. "It means iron, in the old language. There's a forest in the old stories called Járnviðr. The Iron Wood. It's where the wolves come from."
Jarn looked up at me. Then her eyes went, very briefly, to Fenrir.
Fenrir was suddenly extremely interested in the training dummies.
I have been a father before. I know exactly what that look means. I didn't say a word. I just gave Jarn her head pat, endless head pats, at her leisure, and went inside, grinning like an idiot the whole way up the stairs.
That night, after Juliet was asleep in her tower room, I logged off.
I didn't go downstairs right away. I stood in the upstairs hallway of my real house for a long time, in front of a door I hadn't opened in seven years.
Juliet's room was exactly the way it was. I'd had a cleaning service do the rest of the house for years, but I'd always told them to skip this one. The air was stale. Her drawings were still taped to the wall over the bed, curled at the corners now. There was a horse that looked like a dog, and a dog that looked like a potato, and one of the three of us holding hands in front of a house with a purple roof.
I sat on the edge of her bed.
I'd made her. I'd made her and she'd called me Papa, and she'd laughed exactly the same, and today she'd yelled goodnight to an entire city from her tower window. And she wasn't her. She was lines of code in a server somewhere, being treated as an NPC by an AI that had decided not to ask too many questions about her.
I didn't know which of those things to feel. So I felt all of them.
Agnus found me there an hour later. He didn't say anything at first. He just sat down on the floor with his back against the bed, the way he used to sit outside my room when we were kids and Mom and Dad were fighting.
"Is it wrong?" I asked eventually. "She's a game. She's not... she's a game."
Agnus snorted.
"Bro. You're asking the guy who's trying to raise his wife from the dead with a necromancer class."
I laughed. It came out wet and terrible, but it was a laugh.
"She called me Papa, Agnus."
"I know. I saw the announcement. Everybody saw the announcement." He was quiet for a second. "Cindy used to say grief is just love that doesn't have anywhere to go. Maybe you just built it somewhere to go."
We sat there until the sky outside started getting light. Then he got up, went downstairs, and started making breakfast badly, which is the only way he knows how to make it. I opened Juliet's window to let some air in, and left the door open when I went down to save him from the eggs.