"That statue," he asked me, "What's the story behind it?"

"I beg your pardon?" I was taken aback by the suddenness of the question. Not that it was an inappropriate topic of conversation for two level guardians, a Final and a close Penultimate, enjoying a much-needed tea break in the calm and privacy of a dungeon's staff cafeteria. I hadn't thought about that statue for a long time, maybe thousands of years. It had become, in more ways than one, part of the furniture. This thought made me almost as uncomfortable as the statue suddenly coming up in conversation without warning.

"The centrepiece of your arena. You know which one I mean. There's no use trying to be mysterious. We're not on the clock and nobody's watching. It's something special, isn't it? It's been there for longer than I have, and yet it looks brand new."

"I polish it every day. It's my favourite."

"For what reason? It's not that beautiful compared to some of the others in your collection."

"It's a petrified enemy," I replied, sipping my tea, "I like to gloat over it."

"Oh, come on, half your collection are petrified enemies and that one looks nothing like them. For a start, it's posed all wrong. It looks more like a model sat there while it was sculpted. Besides, the guy's dressed in a novice's equipment but his face sort of says 'experienced adventurer'. And your face isn't gloating when you look at it."

"You're very perceptive," I replied. The spoon clinked against my teacup. The silence was growing uncomfortable. I could hear it over the background music. My genteel sips were being distorted into boorish slurping.

"So what is special about it? Trap trigger? Animates as a Golem? It's not your phylactery, is it?"

"I certainly would not animate a petrified enemy as a Golem. It would be unbelievably poor taste. And as for the phylactery idea... it would be like taking the clothes off a dead person and putting them on. Only adventurers do that."

"You have a good point. You take far more care of that one than you do all the others, though."

"Of course I do. It is, after all, in the conditions of the contract."

""What contract?"

"The reason the statue looks so posed, is because he entered into the state of petrification willingly. In fact, he contracted me to do so," I said, finishing my tea. My Penultimate poured a refill for both of us. He's the kind that are hard to come by these days, neither the type to poison your tea if you take your eyes off him for a moment, or the type who were too slavishly loyal, lacking the creativity to understand the art of brewing a decent cup of tea.

"I asked him if he understood that it would mean his death, that it wasn't some kind of cheap preservation to be revived later he was requesting," I continued.

"And what was his reply?"

"'That's the entire point'," I quoted, now recording the words exactly, including the straightforward tone of voice with only a hint of weariness that sounded less sane than any incoherent raving, "'In death there is no change. And a statue decays a lot slower than a corpse.'"

"I wasn't sure what to say to this," I admitted, "He went on to specify that it was important he be in a specific pose, and that he be dressed in exactly what he was wearing, his belongings positioned in a certain way. He wore his sword, despite my demand to drop his weapons if he was trying to negotiate. I could tell he was speaking the truth when he said he wasn't going to attack. There was a look of sublime surrender on his face as he spoke that I at first mistook for very heavy mind control, then insanity."

"He was dressed the exact same way he is now, of course," I continued, "I asked him if he was trying to preserve a certain memory, for the sake of nostalgia. He replied that it was much more. It was required of him that he preserve his exact state of being, at a single moment in time, with no possibility of change, for as long as human history could possibly record."

"I replied that something like timestop would be more appropriate. It would, by definition, be a false representation, unless he was made of stone at that moment in time he was trying to represent, as well."

"He replied that timestop would cause more strain on time and space than he wished to inflict, especially as, in his words 'I have already done enough damage'. Besides, he knew I would not have agreed to use of those kind of expensive reagents on a complete stranger."

"He did, however, request that his statue be well maintained over the millennia. I asked who might come to visit it. He explained that it was his rather large, similarly experienced adventuring party, but that I shouldn't worry, as they don't really raid any more. 'We finished our own quest long ago, and we are all at the kind of stage where it is normal for a hero to sleep beyond time until they are needed again, if they get themselves mixed up with the wrong kind of deity. If and when they come, it'll just be to make sure I kept my promise.'"

"I asked what promise that was, and he said 'that when I finally returned, after all the long years of being away, I would be exactly the same as when I left, so much so that we could keep on going as if we never left."

"'That's a stupid promise to make,' I had replied, 'Everyone is changed by the passage of time, long journeys and long absences. And besides, you won't be able to go anywhere.'"

"'But right now I am in that state,' he argued, 'And I am confident I can keep it up long enough to preserve myself that way. It's taken me all day to will myself into this perfect state, to prepare myself mentally for what I know I'm going to have to go through. I don't expect this to be nice for me or solve everything. It's become my only choice, and it'll be nothing compared to what I endured on that journey. By refusing to let it change me, I've beaten it in the end. And I'm giving you the ultimate victory, as a respected final guardian, for free. All you need to do is look after a statue for a few millennia.'"

"'Do you not even care about the consequences to fate of a Final Guardian victory?' I asked, raising an eyebrow. He didn't even change his expression."

"'After what I've seen? No, not particularly. Not in the grand scale of things. Mostly I care about my pact with the rest of my adventuring party.'"

"'And you don't think they want to see you again in the flesh? Even after a few changes? They'll probably understand.'"

"'The rules of the pact stated death for everyone if any of us failed to keep to it.'"

"'And what if one of them has changed?'"

"'They won't have. They have been able to keep everything the same. I was not in a position to. I make no excuses for myself, though. There were reasons, but I still failed.'"

"I could tell by his eyes," I told my Penultimate, "That he wasn't the type of adventurer you normally see. Neither the self-righteous type obsessed with bipolar models of good and evil, or the mercenary type who just want to steal anything not nailed to the floor, then steal the nail gun and come back for the rest. I would have said no, if I thought he was. I wouldn't have even killed him, just turned him away in disgrace. Something in his eyes said this was too important. That if I said no, I would be missing out on something that might never come up again in the lifespan of the Universe."

The rest of the tea break went by in silence. Eventually, the Penultimate changed the subject, talking about trivial business matters, how well the slimes were breeding in the lower catacombs, whether the chests had been restocked today, if that broken save point at the third floor entrance was ever fixed. I was relieved not to have to bring up the way that the eyes seemed to follow me around sometimes when I was pulling night shifts, or how there had been rumours about the few survivors of the rifts to other worlds, how they had only kept their sanity by learning how to separate their mind from their body at will.

The adventuring party came by in the end. They must have been the fifth generation but it was hard to tell, when each new initiate was conditioned to act exactly like their predecessor in all things, as though they were some kind of ritual Empress. As promised, they weren't really there to steal or pick fights, they just wanted to be out of town by the time the recruitment drive season began, as there were strict rules about not running with other parties. Sometimes they sat around on benches in the way that adventurers do when they are too high a level to consider a dungeon a threat any more, and are just there to admire the view, and discussed the sort of things that you still considered important when you had earned the time-transcending tranquility that came with reaching the end of your life's quest, things that touched upon their eccentric leader's warning about the fabric of space and time, and about things worse than final guardian rule. Finally they left to hunt after obscure places and things for the sake of completionism. They always returned here. Eventually we figured out that they liked the music.

My Penultimate succeeded me so I could retire from duty, take a vacation to the Capital and interfere in Guild politics until they got completely sick of me. He raised his own apprentices and one day picked his favourite to succeed him, I guess. By that time the adventurers stopped coming, maybe falling into the centre of the nexus of completion I once guarded the door to, but could not look directly at. The dungeon probably didn't bother maintaining the statue as much, allowing the plants and the elements to take it over. But I am a Final Guardian, and we live longer, we retain our purpose when you are gone, and we remember everything that happens within those walls.