They stood at the bottom of a spiral staircase of misted glass steps that rose like a crystal forest from the center of the floor. The room itself was a great, bell-shaped thing, with a ceiling painted midnight-blue, labeled with all the constellations in the sky and at what times of the year they are visible, and the floor a map of the entire world.

“I built it for you, Helen,” the man said, with pride in his voice as he stared up the steps. The woman beside him had a weary, pinched sort of look about her, the sort of look people get when they’ve been forced to endure too much stress for far too long. She was a slight, slender, and under-fed looking thing, but there remained a whisper of the beauty she surely must have possessed in her younger years. Her hair was a rich brown, touched with red, and her eyes were a piercing grey-green that would have been brilliant had they not taken on the dull and guarded sheen of apathy.

“All right,” said Helen cautiously, eyeing the steps. “But…they go up to the ceiling, and then they stop. What’s the point?”

“Point? POINT?!” The man chortled loudly, and it reverberated about the room. “There is no point, Helen! It’s just beautiful. Beautiful things don’t need to have points!” This last statement was tinged with derision. “But follow me, and you’ll see,” he continued more softly, moving toward the steps.

He stopped at the bottom-most one, and held out his hand with a smile playing about his lips, his dark eyes glittering with mischief. Helen sighed and reluctantly moved to take his hand, and together they began to climb the stairway. It put Helen heavily in mind of glaciers.

They reached the top, and Helen raised her eyebrows, looking down. “It’s…a nice view,” she said lamely.

The man only laughed, and then whispered something under his breath, touching where the center of the ceiling and the glass framework supporting the staircase met.

Helen gasped, and watched as the ceiling began to dissolve to reveal what seemed to be the open sky. She could see clouds drifting across a strip of smooth, eggshell-blue canvas, and beams of sunlight seemed to illuminate whatever the ceiling was dissolving into, casting streaks of light about…the walls?

Helen squinted, for the ceiling had dissolved only to a point, and another glass step had sprung into existence, connecting to the platform that the ceiling had become.

She gingerly stepped up onto the last step and onto the platform with a vaguely worried expression, as though concerned that it would not support her weight.

But her expression was transfigured into one of shock as she looked around the room, for it had become just as wide in diameter as the hall below, but perhaps half its height.

The ceiling was nothing more than a glass panel, like a great skylight, and all around were wooden cabinets of oak. The floor was also oak, but covered almost completely in a fluffy, welcoming, dark-red carpet. Bookshelves lined the walls halfway around the circular interior of the room on the far side, but were empty.

The center of the room had comfortable-looking navy-blue couches that were fashioned in the shape of a circle, surrounding a circular glass table. Where the walls were not lined with bookshelves, the cabinets were filled with dishes and beautiful, fragile-looking antique china, and others were filled with statuettes and glass ornaments and other such decorations. One part of the wall, just to the left of the where the stair met the platform, was left blank, and was painted with a mural of a great blue Japanese-styled dragon and a black silhouette of a plum tree.

“…It’s…” Helen raised her arms and lowered them again, turning around to stare at the man, who remained on the step, wearing an expression that suggested he was all too pleased with himself. “I’m speechless.”

“Of course you are. All the best gifts leave you speechless,” he said happily.

“Magic?” Helen whispered, walking over to run her fingers over the dragon’s great eye ridge.

“Yep, and the best part is that it never, ever changes!”

“What do you mean, it never changes?” asked Helen sharply.

“I mean it never changes. Make a mess, and leave the room. It will return to the state it was in before you changed it. I left the bookshelves empty so that you could create your own library. All you need to do is say the word of a book you want and it will appear on the first shelf, there, at the top,” and he pointed to the furthest bookshelf on the left. “They’ll be in alphabetical order by author. If you suggest a book and then another one that would come alphabetically before it, the previous one would simply be shunted to the side.” He paused. “Those are your changes to make, as are any kind of decoration. I can make whatever personal touches you choose permanent, but they won’t be changeable after. Leave the room and your books will be there, and the art you choose to decorate with will be there. For the most part, I put all of the things I knew you loved in the cabinets, and the rest is up to you. Oh, and the room is timeless!” The man’s voice took on a new note of pride. “It took me forever to get the spell right. Come here, time won’t pass. You won’t need to eat, but you can if you want. You just touch the table and tell it what you want, and as long as it’s in this household, it will appear. And you won’t need to sleep, or anything else.”

Helen had listened quietly as the room was explained to her, but was walking around the room, running her hands across the cabinets and walls, hardly daring to believe that it was all real. Her eyes had softened to the point of revealing emotion, though the man could not see this. He did not need to.

He did not speak for a moment, clearly waiting for Helen to say something.

“How do I get into it without you?” she asked finally, walking back toward him.

“There’s a password. It’s saecula saeculorum, for timelessness,” he replied, looking over his handiwork once again.

“Saecula saeculorum,” Helen whispered to herself, staring at the floor, shocked to find a tear running down her cheek. Silently she moved toward the man and hugged him. “Thanks, Victor. I don’t know what to say. It’s the best present I’ve ever been given.” And without warning, she started sobbing into his shoulder, her bony shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

Victor returned her embrace, running his fingers through her dark hair. “I know, Helen. That’s why I did it. Now you have a place to go. It will always be safe.”

She pulled away for a moment to look into his dark eyes with her own; one of the rare times where she chose to look another in the eyes at all. He grabbed her shoulders, smiling slightly at her flushed cheeks and mussed hair.

“It will always be safe.”