Climbing the Tower of Teeth was an exercise in agony.
The teeth on the walls were not stationary. They ground against each other, shifting, opening and closing like the jaws of a thousand small mouths. Handholds appeared and disappeared. Footing was a gamble. Twice, Kaelen slipped, his fingers scraping against stone as he caught himself on a tooth that bit into his palm.
The cultists fared worse. One of them,a middle-aged man with a grey beard, lost his grip twenty feet up and fell. He did not scream, he simply dropped, his body disappearing into the darkness below. The sound of his impact came a long time later, a wet, crunching thud that made everyone freeze.
"Keep climbing," Lysander said. His voice was flat, unsympathetic. "Stop, and you join him."
Silvara cursed under her breath. The young man, awake now, pale and shaking, clung to the wall with desperate fingers. Tears ran down his face, but he climbed.
Kaelen climbed too. His arms burned. The gap between intent and execution was almost gone now. He moved like someone who had done this before. The fragment in his palm pulsed with each handhold, guiding him, showing him where the teeth would open and where they would close.
Lysander climbed beside him, always within arm's reach. The Duke did not struggle. His movements were fluid, unhurried, as if the tower were a staircase and the teeth were mere decoration.
"You're not human," Kaelen gasped, pulling himself onto a narrow ledge.
Lysander landed beside him, silent as a cat. "You are just weak."
The ledge widened as they climbed, becoming a series of platforms connected by short bridges of tooth-stone. The crystals grew thicker here, their light casting the walls in shades of blue and green and pulsing red.
Kaelen counted the surviving cultists. Silvara. The young man, two women, one older, one younger. Four left. Three had fallen. He did not know when the third had gone had not heard the scream.
The system flickered:
[Dungeon Progress: Tower of Teeth – 60% ascent completed]
[Warning: Mana density increasing. Spatial anomalies detected ahead.]
MRRR
"What was that?" Kaelen muttered tired.
Lysander answered: "The tower is waking up."
As if in response, the teeth on the walls began to move faster. The grinding sound grew louder, more frantic, and the platforms beneath their feet started to shift tilting, sliding, rearranging themselves like pieces of a puzzle.
"Run," Lysander said.
They ran.
The bridge ahead of them collapsed as they reached it, the tooth-stone crumbling into dust. The gap was too wide to jump but the walls on either side were close, close enough to brace against.
Kaelen did not think. He leaped, hit the opposite wall with his back, and pushed off, crossing the gap in two desperate bounds. He landed hard, rolled, came up with daggers drawn.
Silvara followed, her broken spear clenched in her teeth. The young man came after her, sobbing. The two women made it across, one after the other.
Lysander did not jump. He stepped off the edge of the crumbling bridge, into empty air, and landed on the other side as if he had simply walked across solid ground.
Kaelen stared.
"Like I said, weak," Lysander said.
The teeth behind them snapped shut, grinding the bridge into nothing.
They found the camp on the next platform.
It was the same camp people. Kaelen knew it immediately.
The rumpled bedroll, the cookpot, the leather satchel spilling its contents. But it was older now, the fabric faded, the cookpot rusted. As if time moved differently here, faster, slower, sideways.
The child's drawing was pinned to the wall with a tooth. The flower had been colored in. The colors were wrong purple sky, green sun, a black flower with red thorns.
On the back, new writing: They are coming. Hide.
"There's no one here," Silvara whispered. "Where did they go?"
Kaelen looked at the passage leading deeper into the platform a narrow tunnel, lined with crystals, pulsing with that strange, shifting light. The fragment in his palm pulled him forward.
"This way," he said.
They followed the tunnel into the heart of the tower.
The chamber at the end was not large.
It was a circle, perhaps twenty feet across, with a ceiling so low that Lysander had to duck. The walls were covered in teeth, but these teeth were different golden, glowing, arranged in spiraling patterns that made Kaelen's eyes water. At the center of the chamber, seated on a throne made of fused jawbones, was a figure.
It was a child. A real child flesh and blood, breathing, alive. A girl of perhaps eight, with dark hair in tangled braids and a face that had not smiled in a very long time. She wore a nightgown, stained and torn, and her bare feet did not touch the floor.
Her eyes were closed.
The fragment in Kaelen's palm screamed.
"She is the core," Lysander said. He did not sound surprised.
The girl's eyes opened.
They were not human eyes. They were yellow and slit-pupiled, like the eyes of a Harvester, like the eyes of the Watcher.
"You came," she said. Her voice was the voice of the Watcher, the voice of the core, the voice of the tower itself but underneath it, faint and thin, was the voice of a little girl. "You came to take my crystals. To leave me alone."
Kaelen stepped forward. The cultists cowered behind him. Lysander's hand lifted his hand as if to stop him the stopped half way.
"We're not leaving you," Kaelen said. His voice was steady. He did not know why. "We're taking you with us."
The girl's yellow eyes widened. For a moment, just a moment, something flickered behind them something human.
Then the dungeon screamed.
The walls shook. The golden teeth began to grind. And from the shadows at the edge of the chamber, the Watcher stepped out, no longer wearing the child-skin but something worse a shape that was not a shape, with too many limbs and a mouth that opened sideways.
"She is ours," the Watcher hissed, the cave vibrating. "She has always been ours."
Kaelen ran to the girl and reached for her hand, while the watcher was screaming.
Her fingers were cold. So cold.
But they closed around his, and she looked at him with those terrible yellow eyes, and whispered: "It hurts. It always hurts."
"I know," Kaelen said. "I'm sorry."
He pulled.