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The underground reconstruction, however, had barely started. The surveyors had only just completed their work, but at least now, Hector had a rough map of the grounds and quick sketches of all the floor plans. He’d learned that the eight underground towers all boasted twenty-four floors, with the exception of two--those being the Star Tower, which only had its top nine and a half floors, and the Entry Tower, which required thirty-two in order to reach the surface.

Expectedly, the Tower of Night was shown to be the largest with an average of twelve rooms per floor compared to the others’ averages between seven and ten. In total, the castle had seventy-one lavatories, twenty-five hearths, six gathering halls, four kitchens, four adjacent bathhouses, one multilevel library, eight rainbow shrines, and then about six hundred empty rooms of undesignated function. This was not counting any of the buildings above ground or in the lake below Warrenhold.

The numbers left Hector a bit overwhelmed, to say the least. This wasn’t a house. It was a town. He couldn’t imagine ever needing this much space for anything. When he asked Voreese why Stasya had made it so gigantic, the reaper said that it was because she’d hoped Warrenhold would one day become a center of commerce between the surface world and the Undercrust.

‘And she specifically wanted it to be a fortress so that it could protect itself from all manner of exploitation by external forces,’ Voreese had said. ‘When she was building it, Stasya considered Warrenhold to be an investment in humanity itself. She wanted this place to change the world.’

Hector could see why Voreese seemed to remember the woman so fondly.

And yet, he only had to look at Warrenhold now in order to understand what had become of Stasya’s dream. It was a sobering realization, that. Hector would have liked to know the full story of how Stasya had died, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He didn’t see how it could be anything other than sad. Voreese never brought it up, either, but that might have only been because she hadn’t stuck around very long. She and Roman had their own matters to attend to, of course.