"My head is killing me," I muttered, my voice thick with sleep as my eyes groggily cracked open. The world came into focus in fragments, blurry shapes slowly sharpening into familiar objects.
I was hunched over my desk, face pressed against an open textbook, drool pooling on the page beneath my cheek. My neck screamed in protest as I lifted my head, vertebrae popping like bubble wrap.
The dorm room materialized around me in all its cramped, cluttered glory. Books fiction or otherwise littering my shelves, and the perpetual smell of instant ramen and energy drinks hung in the stale air. Thankfully I lived alone, my dorm mate, Lloyd, had moved into his girlfriend's dorm sometime last semester, lucky bastard.
I rubbed my temples in slow, circular motions, trying to massage away the pounding headache that felt like someone was using a jackhammer inside my skull.
"Seriously, I can't wait for this semester to be over," I groaned to the empty room, my voice cracking from dehydration. Finals were lurking just around the corner like vultures circling roadkill, and I'd been cramming for what felt like weeks.
Sleep had become a luxury I couldn't afford, replaced by an endless cycle of coffee, study guides, and the occasional power nap face-first into my textbooks.
My gaze drifted down to the chaos of papers and books sprawled across my desk. Highlighters lay scattered like fallen soldiers, their caps lost to the void beneath my bed. But the book directly in front of me, the one that had served as my uncomfortable pillow, read in bold letters.
Digital Forensics: Principles and Practices
Something caught my eye on the corner of the desk, my phone, but it looked... different.
The case was a shade lighter than I remembered, more of a light green than the deep emerald I'd chosen specifically because it reminded me of my favorite hoodie. I frowned, picking it up and turning it over in my hands.
The texture felt the same, the weight identical, but that color difference nagged at me, though I decided not to mind it, maybe it had lost some of it's color over the past few years and I had only noticed now.
I pressed the power button, and the facial recognition unlocked it instantly. The home screen looked normal enough, same basic wallpaper, same arrangement of apps. Everything seemed in order, so I shrugged and stuffed it into the pocket of my wrinkled jeans.
My legs felt like overcooked spaghetti as I stood up, pins and needles shooting through my feet. I'd been sitting in that position for hours, and my body was staging a revolt. I stretched my arms overhead, feeling my spine crack in a symphony of pops that would have made a chiropractor weep.
I decided to wash myself up a bit. I shuffled toward the door, my sock-covered feet sliding slightly on the linoleum floor. The door creaked as it always did, a sound I'd grown so accustomed to that I barely noticed it anymore.
The bathroom was just that... a bathroom if a bit crammed. This was college after all what were you expecting. I flicked on the light, squinting as my pupils contracted against the harsh brightness. The mirror reflected back a face that looked like it had been through a blender set to college student.
My hair was a disaster zone of auburn reddish strands that had grown out into an awkward middle ground. My eyes, normally a decent shade of green, were bloodshot and surrounded by dark circles so pronounced they looked like I'd been punched by a very symmetrical boxer. The bags under my eyes had their own bags at this point.
My face looked pretty much dead, maybe that's why I hadn't got a girlfriend yet, meh not that it matters. My lean build was still intact, thank god for the university gym. I tried to hit the gym three or four times a week, partly for my physical health but mostly because it was the only time my brain could shut off from the constant stream of study material.
The faucet groaned to life when I turned the handles, pipes protesting with a series of clanks and gurgles before water finally emerged. I cupped my hands beneath the lukewarm stream, watching as the clear liquid pooled in my palms.
I splashed the water onto my face, gasping slightly at the temperature. It wasn't cold enough to be truly refreshing, but it was better than nothing. I repeated the process several times, rubbing my eyes and trying to scrub away the exhaustion that seemed to have taken up permanent residence there.
The face towel hung limply from its hook, a sad beige thing that had seen better days. It smelled faintly of fabric softener and desperation. I dried my face, the rough texture of the worn fabric scratching against my skin, then tossed it back onto the rack with the precision of someone who had perfected this routine over months of repetition.
Back in my room, I stretched again, raising my arms above my head and twisting my torso from side to side. My shoulders popped like a string of firecrackers, releasing some of the tension that had built up from hours of hunching over textbooks.
"Shit, I'm gonna have scoliosis for sure when I'm forty, aren't I?" I muttered to myself, imagining my future self hunched over like Quasimodo.
The bed called to me like a siren song, its unmade covers promising relief from the torture device that was my desk chair. I collapsed onto the mattress, feeling the springs protest under my weight. The bed wasn't much, a standard-issue dorm mattress that had all the comfort of a park bench, but after hours at my desk, it felt like a cloud.
I fished my phone out of my pocket, the screen illuminating my face in its pale glow. The time read 8:57 PM, which seemed reasonable enough. I'd lost track of time completely, something that happened frequently during these marathon study sessions. Time became fluid when you were surviving on caffeine and determination.
"Hmm, it's a good time," I said aloud, my voice the only sound in the room besides the eternal hum of the air conditioning. "I should call Dick and the rest to plan a study session for tomorrow. Maybe ethics and data communications, yeah, that sounds good."
Dick was my study buddy, my partner in academic crime. We'd been friends since high school and even went to the same college, classes and tuition, we had even decided that if we were ever to have kids we would make them friends, so the lore could continue.
I opened my contacts, scrolling to the familiar list that I could probably recite from memory. The first two entries were exactly where they'd always been, my parents listed with their characteristic naming convention.
Aaadad.
Aaamom.
But as I scrolled down, something caught my eye. Below my parents was a name I didn't recognize.
Adam.
I stared at the entry, my brow furrowing in confusion. Adam? I didn't know any Adam. I'd always prided myself on keeping my contacts list clean and organized, no random numbers, no people I'd met once at a party and never spoken to again. So who was Adam, and how had he ended up in my phone?
"That's weird, I don't know an Adam," I muttered, but the mystery wasn't urgent enough to derail my study plans. I had more pressing concerns, like the ethics exam that was going to determine whether I passed the class or spent my summer in academic purgatory.
I started looking for Dick's contact. I typed the first letter.
D
A list of names appeared on my screen, but none of them were Dick. I frowned and typed another letter:
Di
The list grew smaller, but still no Dick. My confusion deepened as I typed.
Dic
The screen showed No matches found. What the hell? Why didn't I have Dick's number in my phone? We'd been texting constantly for weeks, coordinating study sessions and sharing notes. His number should have been practically burned into my phone's memory.
I was so focused on the mystery of my missing contacts that I almost didn't notice when the time on my screen changed.
9:00
The moment the digits shifted, the world exploded into chaos.
The dorm room began to tremble and shake like we were caught in an earthquake, I could hear things falling off shelves in rooms up and down the hallway.
Then came the light.
Purple light began to filter through my windows, but it wasn't the soft lavender of a sunset or the gentle violet of dawn. The purple soon turned to green, and lit up my dorm. Was there a strobe light show going on?
The combination was blinding in its intensity, forcing me to squint and raise my hand to shield my eyes. But curiosity, that fatal flaw of human nature, compelled me to investigate.
I left my phone on the bed, its screen still glowing with the no matches found message, and rose unsteadily to my feet.
The floor continued to shake beneath me as I made my way to the window, each step requiring careful balance. The light grew brighter as I approached, and I had to blink rapidly to keep my vision from completely washing out.
When I finally made it to the window and looked outside, I immediately recoiled, stumbling backward and almost falling to the floor.
Dread filled me like ice water in my veins, spreading from my chest outward until every cell in my body was screaming that something was fundamentally, catastrophically wrong.
The source of the light was immediately apparent, and it defied everything I thought I knew about reality. A tower of pure black stone rose from somewhere beyond the campus, its surface so dark that it seemed to absorb all the natural light around it like a cosmic vacuum cleaner.
The purple and green radiance wasn't coming from an external source, it was emanating from the tower itself, my brain was pounding the more I looked at the Tower.
But that wasn't the worst part. Not even close.
The tower was growing.
Floor by floor, level by level, the black structure climbed toward the sky with impossible speed. Each new section materialized with a sound like reality tearing, a deep thrumming that I felt in my bones rather than heard with my ears. The tower pierced through the clouds like a spear thrown by a giant, and when it did, all hell broke loose.
The clouds began to fall.
Not metaphorically, or rhetorically, or poetically or theoretically, or in any other fancy way, the sky was falling literally. The fluffy white masses that had been peacefully drifting through the evening sky suddenly solidified, becoming brittle and glass-like. They shattered against the tower's surface and tumbled earthward in deadly chunks, each piece ringing like a crystal bell as it struck the ground.
The sound was indescribable.
It rang in my ears and made the entire dorm building tremble, and I could hear similar sounds coming from all across the campus as the crystalline cloud fragments found their targets.
But the nightmare wasn't finished yet.
Soon it wasn't just the clouds that were falling, the sky itself began to crack and crumble, revealing patches of the same impossible black that composed the tower. It was as if someone was peeling away the veneer of reality to reveal the void beneath, a darkness so complete that it hurt to look at directly.
"What the hell is going on?" I whispered to myself, my voice not even able to reach my own ears over the noise of reality crumbling.
Everything felt familiar somehow, it was like a weird sense of dejavu. My hands shook as I backed away from the window, my rational mind struggling to process what I was seeing.
I stumbled back to my bed, nearly tripping over a pile of laundry in my haste. My phone was still there, still glowing, still showing that impossible no matches found message. With trembling fingers, I opened my contacts again and selected the first entry.
Aaadad.
The phone rang once, the sound tinny and distant against the apocalyptic symphony outside. Twice. Three times. Each ring felt like an eternity, and I found myself drumming my fingers against my thigh in a nervous rhythm.
"Come on, pick up, pick up," I muttered, my voice tight with panic.
Finally, mercifully, a voice came through the speaker.
"Dad!" I yelled into the phone, probably loud enough to wake half the dorm if anyone was still capable of sleeping through the end of the world. "Are you seeing what's going on? Are you and mom okay?"
There was a pause, static crackling on the line, and then his voice came through clear and calm.
"We're fine, Ben. What about-"
I tuned the rest of the words out, dread taking the place where sound should have been. His voice was different, deeper than it should be.
But that wasn't what made me stop breathing, wasn't what filled me with a dread so profound that it made the falling sky seem trivial by comparison.
It was the name.
My name wasn't Ben.
It was Khan.
Before I could process this impossibility, before I could even begin to formulate a response, a message appeared directly in front of me, a message that resounded in my mind. It wasn't on my phone screen, not on any surface I could identify, it simply existed in my field of vision, written in letters that seemed to burn themselves into my cornea.
[You have been chosen. Climb the Tower of Stories.]