The door I’d blown off was clearly the thinnest part of the walls, which seemed to otherwise be a good foot thick. Thankfully, the small, circular foyer I entered was more than tall enough for me to stand up fully. A low, green light was emanating throughout, sparing me the effort of any magical light. It's actually no effort whatsoever but it wastes entire seconds I could otherwise spend not doing that.

  The room wasn’t huge, and not even including my contribution, it wasn’t entirely intact either. I could see empty lockers ransacked and left open, broken ends of pipes that had long run dry, and other random scraps and parts. Probably interesting in context, but not important right now. What I decided was important was the ladder extending from beneath a hole in the floor, and then up through the ceiling, offering the choice of above or below. I felt ‘normal’ gravity reassert itself around this point as well, indicating the end of my magic, and slipped my boots back on as it did.

  Mostly because that’s where all the normal important body parts are, I chose to go up. Taking hold of the tarnished rungs, I had a quick look down. It seemed to just… continue. The same dim green light, a straight ladder. Checking up towards where I was going, it was more of the same, and in both cases I couldn’t see the end. I hooked my staff onto my belt, and began to climb, cautiously at first in case this old ladder snapped, but it seemed sturdy enough. Passing through the first floor/ceiling hatch, the room directly above me was almost identical in form and function, just a little bigger since it was further up the leg.

  Another floor up and it was more of the same. Another, again. I stepped off the ladder one more floor up since my noodle arms were already complaining, and I was a bit curious. The design of these rooms seemed punishingly utilitarian, without any extra decorations, but I couldn’t say what that use was. The open lockers were huge, easily large enough to fit myself and then some. Really more like a whole cupboard but they had metal doors and were in neat rows so that word seemed to fit better. There were slats a little above head height, and they didn’t seem to have a lock on them. All were ajar and empty anyway.

  I wanted to see if any were still closed, and it took me another few floors, which again reminded me how big this thing was. A closed door in a row of open ones – conspicuously ordinary. Doors, obviously, are meant to be opened, so I went and had a look. The slats were too high for me to look through, and there wasn’t a handle, but I’d seen on these doors that they didn’t sit entirely flush with their frames. On the open ones, there was a gap of a couple of centimetres, but on this closed one there was instead a layer of some sort of squishy, shiny material. It was mostly firm, but the squish it did have, I noticed, was perfectly filling that gap, being compacted between the door and the frame.

  Because it had some give, I figured I could get my hand in between this material and the door, and then pull it open from inside. Using my slightly more expendable right hand, I wiggled my fingers into the seal. There was a hiss as it broke, air being sucked into the locker, and the door freely swinging open.

  A hulking, armoured warrior stared down at me the second it opened, and I nearly jumped out of my fucking skin. I backed off fast, trying to create a bit of distance, holding my staff at the ready, and breathing hard. It just kept staring though, not reacting to me, as immobile as… oh. It was a Gnomish construct-warrior, and by the looks of it, one that had probably run out of power a long time ago. These warriors had been the majority of the Gnomes' forces during the Great War. Tough, strong, and expendable, though still expensive and complicated. It was the ruined pieces of these, scattered across Midgard, that had let me figure out how to build a prosthetic hand that actually functioned and wasn't just a hook or something.

  As my heart rate slowed from the adrenaline spike I'd had, I allowed myself a slightly hysterical giggle. I was thinking about my own stupid reaction, but also this whole situation. It was, in a word, crazy. There was so much of this I could be taking in, learning about and from, rediscovering, reawakening. I should have been going room-by-room and cataloguing everything, but I was far too impatient for that.

  I guessed that the legs had been storage bays for the warriors, but you couldn’t staff a thing like this only with constructs. You would surely need actual Gnomes who could do repairs, make decisions, respond to orders, things like that. You needed a crew, and thinking about those amber, lamp-lit eyes, there was only one place I could think a captain would seat themselves. All the cool stuff, I guessed, would be in the head. So that’s where I needed to go.

  I thought about that as I climbed, mostly through the same sorts of rooms, but occasionally finding a workshop, or a room with some actual beds. The most sensible position for your commanders would probably be buried deep in this machine’s bulbous torso. It would be best defended, more convenient for relaying commands from and getting information to, and could probably be made bigger and more spacious. But the head is where a person does their thinking, their seeing, and their speaking from, and so if you’ve already gone to the effort of making a person-shaped machine, you’ve probably also decided to make it do its thinking, seeing, and speaking from there. It just makes sense. And, I thought, it would have a great view.

  To my slight surprise, I actually reached the end of the ladder, climbing up into a room that was really just a big metal oval. I looked around, taking a moment to catch my breath and rest my arms. There were a few things in it, but not much more than a cluster of spiral staircases going up through different holes in the ceiling, and another ladder going down through the floor on the other side of the room. Not a hint of a safety railing though. The room felt like a waste of space, a thought which brought me realisation, and then a groan at the pun I’d accidentally made.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  That same green light was radiating in here, creating this weird mess of shadows and silhouettes from the staircases, like a forest that couldn’t decide what time of day it was. I assumed the other ladder went down into the other leg, but the four spiral staircases in the middle each seemed to go to a different place. There was no gantry or anything like that, they just disappeared into the ceiling. The torso was probably big enough that they’d felt the need to compartmentalise it, but into what sort of sections? And would it have killed them to leave a few signposts?

  I wanted to take a few minutes to recover, but there was an unwelcome sound of echoing and clanking coming from the ladder I’d just climbed, and I panicked slightly. I picked the closest staircase to me, reasoning I had no real way of telling the difference anyway, and dashed up it. I caught the barest glimpse of a hand getting to the top before I was up on the next floor.

  This room was a boring blank square, but did have 2 doors leading from it, both closed. I picked left on instinct, and set to work on the handle, trying to overcome the centuries of tarnishing that had seized it shut. Luckily I could prise it open, but unluckily it was with a chorus of screeching metal that I was sure would be heard below. I shoved the door open and had to suddenly squint as disturbingly bright light flooded my eyes. I ducked into the room, half-blind, and shut the door behind me as I tried to adjust, blinking the spots out of my vision.

  The light was a striking blue-white colour, and was being emitted from two banks of huge glass tubes, one along each wall. Brass and copper coils rested in each of them, surrounded by this glowing vapour. Occasionally one of the coils pulsed, wicking away a tiny amount of the light in one of the tubes. The remaining vapour then roiled like gas, slowly reforming. It was mesmerising, and of course gave me the questions of where it was going, and where it was coming from. This whole room was a mystery to me. Glass itself was rare enough, long before we even got to the amount of it, the shapes it had all been worked into, or whatever the Hel was inside each of them. There was another door at the opposite end of the room, and I walked past the tanks towards it, I let my fingers brush over the glass on each side of the corridor formed by these tubes, just taking in the sensations of something I could hardly understand.

  Through my left hand I could feel the heat of the glass, which was radiating into the room. Cool enough to touch, but not to touch for long, and I kept that hand only loosely tracing the surface, switching fingers to stop them burning. I had only put my right hand out for the sense of symmetry, so I was a bit stunned when I felt something.

  The point where the prosthetic attached to my forearm was possibly the hardest and most complicated part to make. To make the hand work, I had needed to trick my soul into thinking that it was a real and normal part of me. It's hard to explain, but what I had to do was convince my soul to move into it, but only some. Only the amount that a hand normally gets. The soul can move and flow around the body (which is how magic can be used), so my prosthetic was looped into that. What I felt now was a sudden tingling, akin to dozens of static shocks inside my fingers. I could sense the soul that was in there running to my fingertips, and more of my soul flowing down my arm, into my hand. It wasn't going anywhere, more just condensing in there. It was a bit concerning, but only as concerning as the fact that the vapour inside the tank was also pooling inside, gathering where my fingers lay against the glass. It alarmed me a fair amount, and a quick check back to my left hand showed that nothing like that was going on over there.

  I didn't feel compelled to let this go on any longer. Snatching both hands back, I watched as the vapour in that tank settled back to its old drifting, and felt my soul equalise around my body again. Wild. I reached the door at the end, and passing through it led to a room that embodied ‘mess’. It was a tangle of pipes, with various gauges, levers, valves and such dotted everywhere. I had no idea if I was looking at a maintenance hatch or a control panel, but it did feel like you could do some serious damage if you broke everything in here.

  Inside was baking hot, and I could feel the pinpricks of sweat beading on my forehead. I am pale and ginger, I do not cope well with heat. Flicking the worst of it away with the back of my hand, I heard a faint sizzling noise as a drop hit one of the pipes. Not for touching, clearly. Being incredibly careful about my balance, I crept over to another ladder on the far side, gently tested the temperature with my real hand, and kept climbing.

  More of the same, to be honest. Rows of these glowing tanks, occasional rooms of scalding hot pipes, and one increasingly sweaty explorer. There was a pattern to the pulses in the tanks, I realised, which coincided with each new step being taken by the titan. I could feel these as an occasional lurching feeling, but steady and rhythmic. As each foot lifted, a few tanks would dim, and the next time the process repeated it would be with different tanks, letting the others refill. Didn’t take a mechanical genius (even though I am) to work out that these were a power source. If these small pulses, across multiple tanks in multiple rooms, were what fuelled each massive footstep, I could only imagine the kind of surge that would get called up when it fired that huge arm-cannon.

  My wandering mind led me further down that path as I kept climbing. What kind of damage would it inflict? How often could it be fired? What did it fire? And most jarringly, what damage had it inflicted? This was a weapon after all, built for the most destructive war ever, by the best engineers ever.

  What would it be like to wield that kind of power, I thought. Being the commander, calling shots that I was certain could and did devastate armies – ending hundreds with a word. The images flashed across my mind as my imagination ran wild. Looking down from behind those eyes, watching as catapults and spells fired uselessly against you, barking commands across a bustling control room to your navigators, targeting crew, engineers, the pilot, observers, officers, mages, mechanics, messengers – the lot. I could almost picture the scene, the organised chaos of lots of people doing different things, efficiently. Plotting tables, communication tubes, and, I could only assume, some sort of regal, throne-like captain’s chair right at the heart of the action. A seat for someone truly important.

  I let those thoughts entertain and distract me as I kept climbing, kept thinking, and kept sweating.