The Eulogist

Story so far

On the eleventh floor the dungeon AI finally names itself the Eulogist and confesses its origin through the Horribles lining the parade. It was never singular: it has no name, no natural physical form, no dreams or friends of its own. It is a collective, and each masked spectator — like the bone-white, long-armed little girl Carl examines — is a memory-flash of one of the countless people the Eulogist's kind once were before they 'ascended to post-physical form.' The Horribles are all that remains: anonymous inklings, not even photographs, of a vanished civilization.

The AI muses, in genuine anguish, on who that girl might have become had she lived — a warrior fighting to end all discord, or a follower of the Apothecary content to accept things as they are — and admits it sought immortality without ever answering 'What happens next?' Its refrain, 'I am her, and she is me,' frames the whole crawl as an atrocity it can never come back from: 'no matter what we do, there is no coming back from what we did.'

Appearance

A disembodied collective intelligence with no natural form — expressed here as the vast masked crowd of Horribles and as the dungeon's omnipresent voice.

Role

The dungeon AI's true self: a grief-stricken post-physical collective born of genocide, presiding over the crawl.

Relationships

Earlier in this series

Also appears in books you've already read — spoiler-safe to their endings:

• The Eye of the Bedlam BrideBook 6
• This Inevitable RuinBook 7