The tower's entrance yawned before Kael like the mouth of something ancient and starving. Its jagged arch was not carved but fractured, as if the structure had resisted entry for ages before finally cracking. He stepped inside, and the wasteland's storming whispers fell silent, as though he had crossed a threshold into the hush of a cathedral.
The air was cooler here, heavy with the scent of scorched paper. His footsteps echoed faintly against the smooth glass floor, fractured into spiderweb patterns that glowed faintly with veins of light. The hum of his book pulsed in rhythm with those veins, the resonance almost too precise to be coincidence.
The tower's interior rose into darkness, a shaft that seemed endless. Words shimmered faintly along the walls, entire passages written in light, yet broken—sentences cut mid-thought, verbs without subjects, metaphors that dissolved into nothing. It was as if a thousand unfinished drafts had been stitched together, then abandoned.
Kael reached out to touch one of the glowing lines. It burned cold against his skin. Instantly, his mind was filled with fragmented voices:
"…and then she—"
"—the blood on the—"
"—but he swore he—"
Incomplete stories. A chorus of ghosts trapped in mid-breath.
He pulled back, shivering. "This isn't a book," he murmured. "It's… a prison made of unfinished stories."
The thought lodged like a thorn in his chest. If this tower was a prison, then the whispers calling his name weren't just figments—they belonged to someone bound at its core. The figure in the shard. The one the pedestal had warned him about.
As he walked deeper, the ground sloped downward, spiraling in a slow descent. The whispers returned, softer this time, weaving through the fractured passages on the walls.
"…Kael…
…you carry what they fear…
…a book that does not obey…"
His hand tightened around his own volume. It pulsed warmly, defiant against the tower's chill.
"Why me?" he asked the silence, though part of him already knew. He had broken one story already—Eira's. He had changed it, refused its tragic script. That single act had marked him, made him visible to whatever forces lurked in this place.
The spiral path widened into a chamber. Here, the walls bowed outward, their glass surface cracked deeper, as though something within had pressed against them for centuries. The fissures glowed brighter, almost alive, throbbing with each wordless whisper.
In the center of the chamber stood a dais of obsidian. Upon it, half-buried in the fractured floor, rose the jagged outline of a chair—or no, not a chair. A throne. Shards of broken glass jutted like thorns from its surface, and coiled around it were chains forged of pure script, letters woven into iron links.
The chains hung slack, yet thrummed faintly with power.
Kael froze. He had not yet seen the prisoner, but the presence was undeniable. Heavy. Watching. Waiting.
The whispers coiled closer, like smoke curling around his ears.
"…do you know what chains truly are, Kael?
Not iron. Not weight. But words.
The stories told about you. The ones you cannot escape…"
He shivered. Was the voice real—or only his mind twisting the fragments into meaning?
His thoughts circled back to Liora, to Seroth, to the Archive itself. Weren't they chained too? Bound by the weight of their duty, their silence, their endless repetition of others' stories? Was he any different?
The book at his side pulsed harder, as if warning him against listening. But the words burrowed into him anyway.
"…your book hums because it knows…
…it is not protection—it is a key…"
Kael's breath caught. A key. To open the chains? To free the one imprisoned here?
He stepped closer to the dais, against his better judgment. The cracks beneath his feet glowed brighter with every step, forming sentences that shifted and rearranged. He glanced down, and the words spelled themselves anew:
Every rescuer becomes a jailer in time.
His pulse quickened. "What are you trying to tell me?"
The walls shuddered. For a heartbeat, the fissures widened, and through them he glimpsed something vast moving in the dark—a silhouette like the one in the shard, but larger, immense, its eyes glowing faintly through the cracks.
Chains rattled.
The sound reverberated through the chamber, a weight that pressed into his bones.
"Kael…" The whisper was louder now, almost a voice. Deep, resonant, layered with a thousand echoes. "They lied to you. They said stories must be preserved. But preservation is only another word for suffocation."
He stumbled back, his mind racing.
This is it, he thought. The prisoner… the author and captive.
The voice rolled on, patient and unyielding. "Do you not feel it? Every choice you make bends the script. Every step you take tears the page. You are already breaking their chains, Kael. Why not break mine?"
The hum of his book spiked sharply, almost like a warning cry. Kael clutched it tightly, torn between the voice and the steady rhythm in his palm.
Freedom. Prison. Preservation. Decay.
The chamber quaked, fissures spiderwebbing further across the walls, glowing white-hot. The chains binding the throne rattled louder, though still unbroken.
Kael's breath came hard, shallow. He could feel it now—two currents pulling at him. One urging him to run, to obey the warnings of the Archive. The other luring him closer, tempting him with a promise he didn't yet understand.
His thoughts spun, tangled. If the prisoner truly was both author and captive, then freeing him could unmake everything. But if he left him chained, was he complicit in the silence, in the suffocation of a story begging to be heard?
His hand trembled as he whispered aloud, voice ragged: "What… what happens if I free you?"
The fissures stilled, the whispers softened, as though the tower itself held its breath.
And then, with quiet certainty, the voice answered:
"You will no longer be reading the book.
You will be inside it."
Kael staggered back, his chest tight, his vision swimming. The words cut sharper than any blade. He clutched his book like a lifeline, its hum steady against the chaos, the one anchor in a sea of breaking glass.
And for the first time, Kael realized—his choice here would not just determine the fate of a single story.
It might decide the fate of them all.