His sword hung from his right hand, the blade nicked and streaked with fluids that had long since dried to a dark crust. His arm trembled. Not from fear. Fear had become a foreign language, a concept he recognized the shape of but could no longer speak. The trembling came from exhaustion, from the simple mechanical fact of muscles pushed past their limit and then past that limit again. A gash ran across his scalp, sideways like a second mouth, and blood had dried in tracks down his pale face. His hair clung to his forehead in dark ropes. His eyes, when he blinked, showed nothing but the flat gray of a sky that had never seen sun.
Before him, the monster dragged itself forward.
It had no true shape, only the suggestion of one. Limbs bent at angles that made his own joints ache in sympathy, though he felt no sympathy. A sickly darkness clung to its body like smoke that had decided to stay. It chittered as it moved, a sound like nails on stone, like the clicking of a thousand small bones. Its legs were massive things, chitinous and curved, each step sending cracks through the flagstones.
He raised his sword.
There was no calculation in the movement, no hesitation either. His body knew what to do. Experience had carved the motions into him like grooves in a record, each failure a needle scratch that taught him to move differently, to strike sooner, to trust nothing. He brought the blade down on the creature's leg. The chitin gave way with a wet crack, cartilage collapsing, and the sound was horrible not because it was unfamiliar but because it was the most familiar thing in the world. The sound of something breaking. The sound of something dying. The sound of him still breathing.
The monster scrambled, off-balance now, its remaining limbs scrabbling for purchase on the wet stone. Carlos steadied himself. His face remained neutral, not with the neutrality of calm but with the neutrality of a man who had forgotten how to arrange his features into anything else. He drove the sword into the creature's middle, felt the blade sink through whatever passed for flesh, and twisted. The monster convulsed once, twice, then went still.
He looked down at it. Then he turned.
Forward. That was the only direction that mattered. Upward, because the tower had a top somewhere. The architecture rose around him, gothic and immense, pillars that had once been magnificent now worn smooth by time and scorched by fires he could only imagine. Dust covered everything in a fine gray blanket. Books lay scattered among the debris, their pages long since illegible, their spines cracked open like ribcages. Fallen foundations jutted from the floor like broken teeth.
He moved toward light. Not sunlight, never that. But something that passed for it, a pale glow filtering through what might have been a window. He reached it and looked out.
The sky was wrong. That was the only way to describe it. A storm raged across the horizon, but the storm itself had colors that should not exist together, purples that bled into greens that bled into something that had no name. The wind howled, though he could not feel it through the glass. Illusions danced across the clouds, shapes that suggested things he did not want to name. Looking at it made his stomach turn, though his face showed nothing.
He looked down instead. Mist. Nothing but mist, swirling endlessly, and below that the structure of the tower itself expanding downward into infinite darkness. How far down did it go? He had stopped wondering. He had stopped wondering most things.
He found stairs. He took them. Each step echoed in the silence, and the silence pressed against him like a hand on his chest. He took turns at random, though nothing was random anymore. He had walked these corridors so many times that every corner felt like a memory, every shadow a familiar shape. And speaking of shadows.
Something moved to his left.
Dark armour. That was what they had in common, these things that hunted him. Dark and shadow and the kind of silence that came before a scream. He saw the blade coming before it arrived, his body already shifting, his sword already rising to meet the attack. Metal clashed against metal. The impact sent a shock up his arm, and then something else happened. Something wrong.
His wrist broke.
The crack was audible, a sharp wet sound that should have made him cry out. He did not. He stepped back instead, looking at his right hand dangling at an awkward angle, and his inner voice supplied a single word. 'Unexpected.' That was all. Not pain. He had forgotten how to feel pain properly, or perhaps he remembered it too well and had simply stopped responding. He grabbed the sword with his left hand instead, sidestepped a slash from his right side, and parried the next attack. The force of it traveled up his left arm, through his shoulder, rattling his teeth.
This thing was strong. They always were. The further he descended, the stronger they became, as if the tower itself was testing him, grading him, finding him wanting each time.
In a moment too quick for thought, he dodged and kicked a nearby shelf. Books tumbled down in a cascade of leather and parchment, burying the dark knight in a avalanche of old knowledge. Carlos was already moving, already above the thing, driving his sword through its helmet before it could rise. The knight shuddered. It collapsed. The books settled around its body like mourners at a grave.
He withdrew his blade, wiped it on the knight's cloak, and searched his pack for something to bind his wrist. A strip of cloth. He wrapped it tight, his teeth pulling the knot, his left hand clumsy but functional.
'Completed,' he thought, though he was not sure what the word meant anymore.
This was his routine. His existence. Carlos had woken into this nightmare and could not remember waking anywhere else. The tower was all he knew. The monsters were all he fought. And the worst part was not the dying, not the breaking, not the endless climbing. The worst part was much worse than that.
Carlos did not know what he was. He did not know who he had been before the first death, before the voice that spoke to him in the darkness, before the sword had found its way into his hand. Perhaps that was a blessing. If you did not truly know yourself, if you had no memory of a world outside the tower's walls, could you really suffer? Was suffering even a concept that applied to you?
He continued forward.
The corridor opened into a vast circular arena, its floor covered in shallow water that reflected the dim light from above. Pillars rose around the edges, their surfaces carved with faces he did not recognize, scenes he could not interpret. He settled into his stance, left hand gripping the sword, right arm hanging useless at his side despite the binding. The water rippled around his boots.
A worm descended from the ceiling. It came down one of the pillars, its body segmented and pale, its mouth a circular ring of teeth that spun as it moved. And its eyes. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. They covered its head like a cluster of dark grapes, each one swiveling independently, each one watching him.
Carlos looked down at his broken wrist. 'Not dominant hand,' he thought, 'but it will do.'
The worm reached the floor. The water was shallow, only up to his ankles, but every step required effort, a constant pulling against the resistance. The light from above was sparse, but his eyes had been born into darkness long ago. He could see the creature's every movement, the way its segments rippled, the way its eyes tracked him.
It lunged.
He swung.