The ground beneath the leaning towers was not solid earth but a crust of pale stone cracked like dry skin. Every step toward them gave off a hollow echo, as though Kael were walking on a drum. The Sovereign Flame pulsed in his chest—quick, hard beats, a silent war drum of its own.
Up close, the towers were not many but one—a spiraled structure coiling upward, bending and twisting as though it had grown, not been built. Its surface was neither brick nor stone but an uneven layering of something like bone, fused with plates of black metal.
There was no door. There was only an opening—too narrow for comfort, yet somehow swallowing the light around it.
Kael stepped through.
The First Floor – The Hollow Feast
Inside was a long hall lit by no torches, yet he could see. A table stretched into the darkness, set with silver platters heaped high with food—roast meats, steaming bread, fruits spilling from gold bowls.
But as he walked closer, the scent turned wrong. Meat souring, bread molding, fruit leaking black rot. The figures at the table turned to look at him—people with familiar eyes and mouths, faces from the villages he'd passed, comrades from past battles. Their lips moved, but the sounds were only chewing, tearing.
One at the head of the table raised a cup, and Kael froze. The man's face was his own.
"You've already eaten," the double said, voice warm with poison. "And you will eat again."
The Flame surged, driving Kael to cut through the vision. He swung the bone knife in a downward arc. The hall shattered like glass around him, and he stood at the base of a spiral staircase.
The Second Floor – The Weight of Names
The steps led him to a chamber whose walls were mirrors, floor to ceiling.
Kael's reflection stared back—not just one, but countless versions. Some wore armor, some rags, some bore the marks of wounds he had never taken.
And each one whispered a different name.
He couldn't hear them all at once; the sounds came in fragments—Kael… Kairon… Kaelis… words that felt like they should belong to him but slid away before he could grasp them.
The Flame flickered violently, struggling to keep him tethered. Without his name, each whispered identity was an open door, an invitation to become something else entirely.
One reflection stepped forward, its eyes darker than shadow. "You don't know yourself," it said. "Let me decide for you."
Kael slammed the butt of his knife into the mirrored floor. Cracks spread outward in a spiderweb of light. The voice screamed—not in his ears, but inside his skull—and the chamber dissolved.
The Third Floor – That Which Remembers
He emerged into a circular room far larger than the outside of the tower should allow. The air here was still, thick, almost wet.
At the center stood a figure cloaked in strips of red cloth, its face hidden, its posture both human and not.
When it spoke, Kael froze.
It said his name.
Not just the sound, but the feeling—the exact weight and warmth of it, as his mother had once spoken it. The gap inside him where his name had been shuddered, aching with the familiarity.
"You left it behind," the figure said, its voice low, like embers under ash. "But I kept it for you. Would you like it back?"
The Flame hissed—not in warning, but in resistance, as if it feared the idea.
Kael's hand tightened on the bone knife. "What do you want in return?"
The figure tilted its head. "Only the Flame."
The room seemed to lean inward, the shadows deepening. Kael realized the danger—not just of losing the Flame, but of regaining his name in a place that could twist what it meant.
He took a step forward. The floor beneath him felt alive, pulsing faintly with heat.
"I'll decide when I'm done here," Kael said.
The figure's head bowed slightly, in something between respect and amusement. "Then climb. The next floor is not mine."
The air rippled, and another staircase unfolded from the wall like a serpent uncoiling.
Kael began to ascend, the figure's voice echoing softly behind him—his name, spoken again and again, until the sound faded into the hum of the tower itself.