The stone road to the tower of the Green Seekers always smelled of life, The scent didn't come from the wild grass swaying at its edges, nor from the markets below the hill, but from the tower itself: Countless flora , libraries tall enough that they seemed to srape the sun, record-keepers moving around documenting every little detail of something new. People said the wind carried that smell out throughout the entire tower, and on certain days one could catch a whiff of it all the way in the low districts of Crea.
Liro adjusted the strap of the satchel digging into his shoulder. He walked slowly—too slowly, perhaps, for someone who was late—but he wanted to take in the sight of the tower properly. The building was not impressive by the standards of larger territories: six stories of pale limestone, with no enchantments visible, only vines crawling over the brick. Yet to someone from the plain, flat farmlands where Liro had grown up, it looked impossibly tall.
At the gate stood a pair of Seekers on duty, they wore robes the color of green olives, not flashy but finely woven, with brass buttons catching holding it all together. Their eyes flicked over the youths filing in—apprentices-to-be, clutching tokens from their villages. Liro noticed the guards didn't look bored the way soldiers usually did. They studied people, as if waiting for someone to stumble and reveal a secret.
Ahead of him, a boy and girl about his age were whispering, the girl kept brushing her bangs out of her eyes, while the boy leaned too close when he spoke. Liro only caught a fragment:
"…they say one Seeker developed a Symphony for talking to rain… just imagine, if we could ask it to fall only at harvest—"
"Don't be stupid. That's not real and besides if it was real, you wouldn't see it, Those types of Symphonies are the domain of Blue seekers we are Green Seekers."
"Why not? Symphonies come in all forms, don't they maybe they have something similar?"
The girl snorted.
Liro smiled faintly but kept to himself, his thoughts strayed elsewhere: to the rumors he'd overheard in the tavern about dissections—illegal ones—done by kicked out apprentices desperate to learn the shapes of veins and organs. He'd never seen such a thing, never dared, but curiosity gnawed at him when he thought about it ,he had a strange interest in disecting insects when he was a child. He shook his head, tried to bury the thought as he stepped closer to the tower's gate.
Inside, the air was cooler, the first floor opened into a broad hall, its walls lined with shelves. Apprentices who had arrived earlier were already waiting, some trying to look solemn, others whispering and chuckling nervously. A Master Seeker in green robes was leaning on a staff near the lectern, hair silvered but face youthful, it seemed as if his skin was radiating every second pulsing with life.
"Sit," the man said softly, but the voice carried.
Liro found a bench near the side, beside a broad-shouldered youth with red cheeks. The boy glanced at him, then muttered, "First time here?"
Liro nodded.
"I'm Orlen. My father says Seekers just shuffle through dusty shelves and I should join a faction with battle Auctors, but I bet there's more to it then just organizing plus I may not look like it, but I enjoy peace and quiet."
His grin widened, revealing a chipped tooth. Liro didn't answer right away, and Orlen leaned closer. "You look nervous, don't worry, they won't bite, not unless you try to burn a book."
The remark earned a laugh from two girls behind them. One had freckles across her nose like spilled ink, and she added, "They say if you dog-ear a page, you get kicked down the stairs."
The chatter swelled, the air filled with voices, for a moment it was easy to forget the weight of ceremony.
Then, at the edge of Liro's vision, something blinked.
Two eyes floated above the floor, not like lanterns, not like spirit flames. Human-shaped eyes, pale and foggy, pupils moving rapidly in all directions as if searching.
No one else stirred, the masters kept speaking. Apprentices kept whispering and then suddenly the eyes hung there, fixing on him, and when Liro tried to look away, he couldn't.
A coldness spread from his chest, as though an invisible hand had pressed against his ribs, his breath faltered.
"Hel..."
he tried asking for help but the next moment, darkness.
-
He woke to a ceiling of pale stone, smooth and cold as if it had been carved yesterday. The smell of flora was gone, the air was cold, dry and empty.
A shape shifted beside him, another boy—though not from Crea. His clothes were unfamiliar, stitched in a style Liro had never seen, dark fabric with loops instead of buttons. His skin was darker, his hair tightly curled, the boy's eyes flicked open at the same time as Liro's.
For a long moment, they just stared at one another, both blinking waiting for the other to talk first.
The foreign boy's mouth opened first, his voice was low, wary.
"…Where is this, did you bring me here?"
Liro swallowed.
"I… don't know, I did not bring you here."
The silence in the pale stone chamber stretched.Liro pushed himself up on his elbows, the cool floor feeling wierd to the touch. The other boy mirrored the motion, dusting off his strange clothes as if he still half-expected dirt.
They studied each other again, slower this time.
"…You're not from Crea," Liro said at last.
The boy blinked. "Crea? I don't know that place I'm from the isles of Hilos." His voice carried an edge—part wary, part testing.
"Hilos…?" Liro repeated, the name rang no bell. "Is that past the Sura Mountain range?"
The boy tilted his head. "Sura… no, It's in the West Sea. Too far for land-travel, weeks by ship, even with a good wind."
Liro's brow furrowed. "That far… then how are we talking? We should not understand each other."
For a moment both fell quiet, they each mouthed a few words under their breath, testing sounds. The boy muttered in a guttural rhythm that made no sense to Liro, but when he spoke aloud again, the words came clear, as if smoothed to understand.
"…This room," the boy said slowly. "It translates for."
Liro swallowed, suddenly aware of how the chamber felt around them—not just cold stone, but a pressure, like a held breath waiting to be released.
The boy's gaze hardened. "If it can twist language, maybe it dragged us here, too."
"Dragged us? Why?" Liro asked, though his own thoughts had already taken the same path.
The boy shook his head, his hands tightened into fists, knuckles whitening. "Back home… before I woke here, I saw something, two eyes, floating in the air."
Liro's chest tightened. "You saw them too."
That admission made them both silent, neither speaking.
Finally, Liro whispered, "Then maybe it wasn't just us."
The silence stretched too long, at last, the other boy spoke."…My name is Kael."
"Liro," he answered, almost relieved to have the word to hold onto.
The names settled between them like anchors in the empty air, but nothing else did.
Kael stood, and crossed to one wall, he pressed a palm against the pale stone, then his shoulder, then struck it with his fist. The sound was dull, without echo, as if the chamber swallowed noise whole.
"Too smooth," he muttered. "No seams, no doors." He glanced back. "Try."
Liro hesitated, then walked to the opposite wall and rapped it with his knuckles. The cold stung more than the impact. He hit harder, but the surface didn't even flake. Just a flat, endless pale.
They circled the chamber in opposite directions, tracing fingertips over the featureless stone until they met again where they started.
"Nothing," Kael said flatly.
Liro sank back down to the floor, hugging his knees. The silence pressed heavier now that they knew it was absolute. Not a single crack, not a single draft of air, just them.
After a long pause, Kael asked, "Do you have a Symphony?"
Liro shook his head. "Not yet. I came to the Green tower to begin apprenticeship."
Kael's jaw tightened. "Same, I was supposed to start training under the Purple Seekers, but I've learned nothing yet, not even a fragment."
The weight of that admission hung between them: two boys, dragged into a place that spoke for them, trapped without tools, powerless even to scratch a mark into the walls.
Kael looked at his own hands as if willing something to spark, nothing did.
Liro whispered, "Then we're really alone."
"Someday had to save us right? Atleast two kids maybe even more suddenly disapeared."
The silence hung heavy
-
Liro blinked. "I've never seen the sea."
"Then you're from inland?"
"Yes. The territory of Crea, It's… small. No great Auctors, Just flat fields andwheat. I thought the Green tower would be the farthest I'd ever go atleast a Mid level Auctor."
Kael studied him for a moment, then gave a short laugh—not mocking, but surprised. "So we're from opposite ends of the world."
Liro couldn't help but smile at that. It was strange, how the realization made the chamber feel a fraction less suffocating. Two boys plucked from distant lands, both powerless, both shoved into this stone box.
"Maybe," Liro said quietly, "there's a reason, some… test?"
Kael rubbed his chin. "A test without doors."
They shared a look then, uneasy but edged with the beginnings of trust. Strangers, but bound by strangeness.
And then—
A sound slithered through the chamber. Not from the walls, not from above, but from inside the stone itself. A rasping voice, broken yet immense, echoed all around them.
"Kill each other."
The words dragged.
Both boys froze, Liro felt his blood run cold, his hands tightening into fists without thinking. Kael's eyes flicked toward him—sharp, assessing, no longer just curious.
The silence that followed was worse than the voice.
The first hours passed with frantic attempts to prove the room was spouting nonsense. Kael shouted, his voice bouncing back flat, dead. Liro pressed his palms against the wall until the skin blistered, searching for some seam. Nothing, thecold stone swallowed their hope.
By the first night, thirst clawed harder than hunger. Their tongues thickened, mouths dry. They tried to sleep, but the silence made the effort worse—every shift of cloth, every breath was a thunderclap.
Liro sat with his knees to his chest, watching Kael rub his cracked lips.
"You'll see," Kael muttered, voice brittle. "They'll open it. This is… this is a trial, right? To see if we break."
Liro wanted to believe him, but doubt gnawed. The Seekers tested patience, cleverness, obedience. But to trap them with nothing? No lesson lay in that, only cruelty.
The rasping command kept replaying. Kill each other. It hisdrowned every thought, sometimes he caught himself mouthing the words.
On the second day, their minds blurred. Kael spoke of his home, the salt-stained ships of the coasts, the whales his uncles hunted. He laughed once, hollow and dry, then coughed blood onto his sleeve. Liro answered with half-dreams of farmlands, rain and soil, the warmth of his mother's bread. They traded scraps of memory like starving men gnawing bones.
When Kael's head lolled, Liro shook him awake. He told himself it was to keep Kael alive, but in truth, the silence terrified him more than anything. When Kael slept, the eyes returned—the floating, fog-pale eyes, watching from the corners of his vision.
By the third night, Kael could no longer fight. His body sagged against the wall, chest rising and falling unevenly, he whispered nonsense in his sleep, tongue swollen.
Liro stared at him in the dark.
The thirst was no longer pain, but a suffocating pressure behind his skull. Every inhale dragged. His heart hammered without rhythm, the boy beside him was no longer Kael, but sound: each rasp of breath, each dry swallow, echoing through his head.
The command stirred again. Kill each other.
No, he would not, he was not that kind of person.
But then he saw Kael's throat pulse, a fragile motion with every breath. His mind latched onto it. One step. One strike. Silence.
He pressed his palms over his ears. The rasping only grew louder inside. His own heartbeat, Kael's breathing, the remembered voice—all fusing into one unbearable roar.
His body moved before he decided.
A shuffle forward.
Then his heel came down, hard.
A wet crack. Kael's gasp caught halfway he started panicking, Liro tried again, He felt Kael's neck mush agaisnt his heel, again a harder stomp, again, again, and then silience.
Kael stopped breathing, no movement.
Silence.
Real silence, at last.
Liro stood frozen he was happy, chest heaving, he waited for the voice to return, for some door to open, for something to change.
But nothing came. Only the pale stone, and the corpse cooling at his feet. Kael's neck had turned complety flat and stretched muscle, broken bone and blood spilling out onto the floor.
Realisation set in, liro began to cry.