Veyne Arclith first felt the pull on a morning that hadn't yet decided whether to snow or rain. The sky hung low, thick and colorless, and the air had that brittle tension that made teeth ache and bones remember old injuries. He sat in the threshold of his crooked little cottage, its roof patched with slate and the bones of old books, watching the horizon like it might confess a secret if he stared hard enough.
He had just finished burning the last page of a forgotten tome—a ritual he performed every solstice, though he no longer remembered why. The fire flickered low in the basin, and as the ink twisted into smoke, he felt it.
It wasn't pain, not exactly. More like pressure behind his eyes, a feeling like the world had taken one step sideways and expected him to follow. Veyne froze. The wind had stopped. The birds, usually so maddeningly persistent this time of year, had vanished.
He stood, slowly, as if sudden motion might draw attention from something vast and watching. His fingers curled unconsciously around the hilt of the broken blade he wore like a joke at his belt.
Then the earth trembled.
Not a quake—a shudder, like the ground itself had gasped. Far off, on the edge of the frost-covered plains, the sky tore open. It didn't split with sound, nor did it crack with lightning. It simply peeled, like wet paper, and from that wound rose the Tower.
Veyne watched, breathless. It didn't grow; it was there, and the world reshaped itself around it to accommodate. Black stone writhed in spiraling formation, a pillar so impossibly high that clouds seemed to recoil from its ascent. The surface shimmered with veins of something like bone, something like gold, and something that pulsed with a rhythm too slow to be mechanical.
Then, he heard his name.
Not with his ears. Not in any language. It sounded in the marrow of him, like a memory half-formed. Veyne. Not called, not invited. Claimed.
His nose began to bleed. He blinked, and for a heartbeat, he saw things not meant for sight—faces stretched in agony across the Tower's surface, mouths stitched shut, eyes inverted. A thousand stories half-swallowed.
And he smiled.
It wasn't bravery. It wasn't madness. It was inevitability. This was not the beginning of his journey. This was the middle. The Tower had always been waiting, and he had always been walking toward it.
Villagers screamed. Some ran. Some simply collapsed, their minds unable to cope. But Veyne? He walked back inside. He took his coat, the one with the hidden compartments. He filled one with chalk. Another with glass beads. He took a page from a book he hadn't burned and placed it over his heart.
He left the door swinging open behind him.
By midday, he reached the edge of the plains. Behind him, the smoke of burning villages curled into a sky too quiet, too still. In front of him, the Tower loomed, and the land near it warped. Grass turned brittle, gray. Trees bowed low, their bark etched with words in dead tongues.
Every few steps, he saw remnants of others who had come before—boots abandoned mid-stride, claw marks in stone, shadows that didn't move even as the sun arced above.
And then he crossed the line.
There was no sign, no marker. Just a shift.
His ears popped. The air grew denser. The colors around him flattened, becoming too vivid and not enough at the same time. The Tower did not have a door. It had a mouth.
The spiral seam along its side peeled, revealing an opening ringed with jagged white stones, almost teeth. A wet heat wafted from within, thick with the scent of ink, blood, and old candles.
Others were there. Not many. A dozen maybe, all scattered across the warped field. Some were weeping. One was praying. Two fought each other in silence, fists moving slow, like underwater puppets.
The Tower chose.
One woman screamed and vanished, pulled in by nothing. Another crumpled, her shadow twitching long after she stilled. And then Veyne felt it again—his name, whispered not in sound but in the spine.
He took a breath.
And he walked forward.
The moment his foot touched the threshold, the world blinked. The sky went black. The light bent inward. And reality shivered.
He was no longer outside.
Inside the Tower, there was no orientation. Floors and ceilings twisted around each other. Corridors breathed. The air had flavor—copper, sorrow, and something sweet, like rot wearing perfume.
Veyne stood on a path of uneven stone, lined by sconces that burned with blue flame. The walls pulsed with something that might have been veins. There was no sound. Not even his own breathing.
Until it started.
A note. Not heard. Felt. Low, constant, like the hum of some ancient engine. It vibrated in his ribs.
His skin prickled.
He turned left. The hallway twisted. Then right. Another spiral. Then—
A dead end.
Except.
His left eye twitched. A ripple moved across the wall.
There.
A wrongness. Something too perfect. Too smooth.
His fingers brushed the surface, and the wall dissolved under his touch, revealing a narrow passage hidden behind illusion.
Veyne grinned. "You really should hide your secrets better."
Something inside him stirred. The Revelation Instinct had activated.
The Tower had welcomed him.
Or feared him.
Either way, he stepped forward, into the darkness that tasted like destiny.
And the Tower closed behind him.