Falling in darkness was not like falling in open air.
There was no wind. No sense of speed. Just a weightless, silent drop through nothing, like the world had simply removed itself from beneath Eran's feet and forgotten to replace it with anything.
Then the ground arrived.
Not hard. Not soft. Somewhere between the two, like landing on packed earth after rain. Eran rolled on impact, came up into a crouch, and had his eyes moving before the dust settled.
He was in a forest.
That was the only word for it, though forest felt too ordinary for what surrounded him. The trees were tall and pale, their bark white as bone, their branches spreading overhead in dense tangles that blocked out any sky. The light here was dim and sourceless, the same pale glow as the Tower walls, as if the air itself was faintly illuminated. The ground was covered in something that looked like moss but was deep blue and faintly luminescent beneath his boots.
Eran straightened slowly. Listened.
Silence. Then, from somewhere to his left, the sound of someone else landing. A grunt of impact. The rustle of movement.
He turned.
The large young man in the red coat was pushing himself upright about fifteen meters away, rolling his shoulders like the fall had been nothing more than a mild inconvenience. He looked around, saw Eran, and lifted his chin in acknowledgment.
"You made it down in one piece," the young man said. His voice was deep, unhurried. "Good. Fewer idiots to deal with."
"I could say the same," Eran replied.
The young man almost smiled. "Drak."
Eran studied him for a second. "Eran."
Two more impacts nearby. The girl with the yellow scarf dropped from above and landed cleanly, both feet together, absorbing the fall like someone who had practiced it. The younger girl came down harder, stumbled, caught herself against a tree trunk. She looked up, checked her hands, then straightened with quiet determination.
The four of them stood in the pale forest and said nothing for a moment.
It was the girl with the yellow scarf who spoke first.
"We dropped in close proximity," she said, her tone light, almost conversational. "That's not random. The Tower grouped us together on purpose."
"You don't know that," Drak said.
"I know enough." She looked at each of them in turn. Her eyes were sharp, the kind of sharp that came from paying attention to everything for a very long time. "My name is Siva. I'm not proposing we become friends. I'm proposing we stay alive long enough to find out what this Trial actually wants from us."
"And what do you think it wants?" Eran asked.
Siva looked at the forest around them. "Every First Trial in every account I've read has one thing in common. It doesn't test strength. Not directly." She paused. "It tests whether you're willing to survive at the expense of someone else."
Silence.
The younger girl spoke quietly from near the tree she had caught herself on. "My name is Noor." She looked at her boots for a moment, then looked up. "And I think she's right."
Drak exhaled through his nose. He did not look pleased, but he did not argue.
Eran said nothing. He was listening to the forest.
Because something in it was listening back.
He could not explain how he knew. There was no sound, no movement in the peripheral. Just a pressure at the edge of awareness, the way you could sometimes feel a person standing behind you in a dark room before you turned around. Something in the pale trees was aware of them. Had been since they landed.
"We need to move," he said.
"Toward what?" Drak asked.
"Away from here first. Toward something second." Eran scanned the tree line. The forest stretched equally in all directions with no obvious landmark except, far ahead through the gaps in the white trunks, what might have been a change in the quality of light. Slightly warmer. Slightly more gold. "There. That direction."
Nobody had appointed him leader. Nobody agreed out loud. But Siva fell into step slightly behind and to his left, and Drak moved up on the right without being asked, and Noor followed close behind. Four people who had known each other for less than three minutes, moving through an impossible forest inside a tower that defied every law of physics they had grown up understanding.
The Tower did not care about their confusion. It never would.
They walked for ten minutes in silence before Drak said, "Something's following us."
"Yes," Eran said.
"You knew?"
"Since we landed."
Drak glanced at him sideways. "And you waited this long to mention it."
"I wanted to see if it would make a move on its own."
"Has it?"
"Not yet."
Siva's voice came from his left, quiet and even. "There are three of them. Moving parallel to us through the trees on the left flank. One more behind. They've been maintaining distance but closing it gradually." A beat. "They're not animals."
Eran looked at her. "How do you know?"
"Animals don't coordinate."
Drak cracked his knuckles. The sound was loud in the stillness. "Good. I was getting bored."
Noor said nothing. But Eran noticed her right hand was pressed flat against her sternum, fingers spread, and the faint pattern of the Ukiran on the back of her hand was glowing with a dim blue light. Quietly. Privately. Like something she was not ready to explain yet.
He did not ask.
The golden light ahead grew stronger. The trees began to thin. And then the forest opened into a circular clearing, wide and flat, with a single structure at its center.
An altar. Stone, old, covered in markings that were not quite writing and not quite art. On top of the altar sat a single object: a flat disc of black metal, roughly the size of a hand, etched with a symbol that Eran did not recognize.
And standing between them and the altar were four other Climbers.
They were older, all of them, and they had the look of people who had prepared for this. Matching gear. Coordinated positioning. The one at the front, a tall woman with close-cropped hair and an expression like a closed door, looked at Eran's group with something that was not quite contempt and not quite interest.
"Four of you," she said. "We were hoping for fewer."
"Disappointing," Siva said pleasantly.
The tall woman's gaze moved to Siva and stayed there. "There's one disc. Sixteen Climbers arrived in this zone. The Trial ends when one group reaches Floor Two." She tilted her head slightly. "The disc is ours. Walk away and we won't make this unpleasant."
Drak stepped forward until he was level with Eran. His Arus was already moving. Eran could feel it, a low heat radiating from the young man's direction, the air around him shifting almost imperceptibly like the space near an open flame.
"Unpleasant," Drak said, tasting the word. "I've been waiting to hear something like that."
The tall woman raised one hand.
Her group moved.
And the clearing erupted.
Drak met the first two head on, his Arus flaring red and hot, the impact of his first strike sending a shockwave through the ground that Eran felt through his boots. Siva was already gone from Eran's side, moving in the direction she had come from so fast she was nearly a blur, yellow Arus flickering like static electricity at her fingertips.
Eran faced the tall woman.
She was fast. Faster than her size suggested. Her first strike came as a palm thrust aimed at his sternum, and Eran stepped aside by a margin that was closer than he would have liked. He felt the displaced air against his jaw.
He had not activated his Arus.
Not because he could not. Because he did not yet know what it would do.
Arus Putih. White Current. The color that did not appear in any textbook he had ever read, that no instructor in Duskmar had ever been able to explain to him, that had appeared in his body at age twelve and frightened every adult who had seen it into immediate silence.
He fought without it. Footwork, timing, reading movement. He was not the strongest person in this clearing but he did not need to be. He needed to be precise.
The tall woman struck again. He redirected her momentum using her own force, and she stumbled forward two steps before recovering.
Her eyes changed. Less certainty in them now.
Behind him he heard Noor's voice, low and focused, and a pulse of blue light washed outward from her position. One of the opposing Climbers who had been moving to flank Eran stopped mid-stride, legs suddenly uncooperative, sinking to one knee with an expression of confused alarm.
Noor stood with both hands raised, the Ukiran on her left hand blazing, her face pale with effort.
The tall woman looked at Noor. Then at Eran. Then at the disc on the altar, calculating.
Eran was already moving.
He crossed the clearing in four strides, reached the altar, and closed his hand around the black disc. It was cold. Colder than the stone it had rested on. And the moment his fingers closed around it fully, the clearing, the forest, the pale trees, the sourceless light, all of it dissolved.
White.
Then the familiar cold of the Tower interior.
Then a floor beneath his feet, solid and real.
Eran opened his eyes. He was standing in a new chamber, higher than the last, the walls a slightly different shade. Drak appeared beside him a second later, breathing hard, grinning. Siva materialized from his left, her yellow scarf slightly askew, expression unreadable. Noor arrived last, quiet, already pressing her hand flat against her sternum again, the Ukiran fading back to its dormant state.
On the wall ahead of them, etched in clean lines, were two words.
FLOOR TWO.
Drak let out a short, satisfied laugh. "Not bad for a group that doesn't know each other."
Siva straightened her scarf. "We still don't."
Eran set the black disc down on the floor. It dissolved into nothing the moment he released it.
He looked up at the ceiling of Floor Two, which he could not see, which extended upward into darkness, which was only the second of however many floors stood between him and whatever was waiting at the top.
He thought of the notebook pressed against his chest.
Trust nothing that lies between.
"Let's find out what's up here," he said.