This wasn t just the side effects of fighting, I said, finally. It isn t even vandalism, smashing things up for the fun of it. This was the complete destruction of everything we believed in and cared for. They wanted to rip out every memory, every meaning of Drood Hall. To spit in the face of our long tradition, and wipe it from the memory of the world. Our enemy wanted to make sure there would be nothing left to remember us by.

We moved on, out of the hallway and into what remained of the ground floor through ragged spaces where doors or walls should have been, through wreckage and destruction, through what had been my home and refuge from the world moving deeper and deeper into the Hall. Into my past. It didn t get any better. The destroyers had been very thorough. Finally I just stopped, weighed down by guilt and responsibility and the burden of memories. I d spent so much of my younger life trying to escape from Drood Hall and my family and their hold over me, but I d never wanted this. I might have dreamed it a few times, but I never really wanted it. Molly looked at me impatiently.

Where are we, Eddie? I don t recognise anything here.

I don t know, I said. I can t tell. I lived most of my life in this place. I knew all its rooms and corridors, all its nooks and crannies and secret hiding places, like the back of my hand, but now I think we re in one of the open auditoriums where people could come to just sit and think, or drink tea and chat or simply rest their troubled souls for a while. Look at it now.

Sunlight streamed in through holes in the outer wall like slanting spotlights, full of listlessly turning dust motes. Ruin and rubble; shadows and darkness. Not one scrap or stick of furniture left intact. As though the enemy had taken time out from bloodshed and slaughter to go through here with sledgehammers, smashing everything that might have been useful or valuable or just pleasant to look at. Or even just fondly remembered by my family. Who could hate us this much? Even the wooden floor had been torn up and split apart, with jagged splinters sprouting up everywhere, as though some great vicious animal had chewed on it.