Chapter 111 – Towers (1)
The carriage wheels hit another rut and my spine filed a formal complaint.
I was halfway through recalculating the Tower's last reported ward load when the air across from me… bent.
One blink, empty seat.
Next blink, Melody.
Black hair spilling down her back. Black eyes like polished glass. Bare feet, because of course she refused shoes. She wore a gothic black dress; high collar, fitted bodice, layers of lace that made her look like she'd stepped out of some noble's funeral portrait.
"Master," she said, scanning the interior with theatrical disappointment, "remind me again why we're in a wooden box when you can fly."
I didn't look up from my notes.
"Because if I fly," I said, "the Tower's long-range wards see 'fast-moving, high-output anomaly' and ring every alarm they have. I'd prefer not to be mistaken for a siege weapon."
"They'd be right," she said mildly.
"That's not the point."
She folded herself into the seat, skirt flaring, then settling.
"So instead," Melody said, "we creep along like peasants and pretend you're normal."
"Yes."
She studied me.
"You didn't bother pretending to be normal with the princess," she said. "You carried her through the sky, gave her a question that will sit in her skull like a knife, and left her in the capital."
I closed the notebook.
"'What makes a good leader,'" she murmured. "'Compassion or cruelty?' You give her that and walk away. Why?"
"She's seen the answer," I said. "Meltèn was the lesson. Executions, cult doctrine, thirsty people dying under a benevolent god's blind spot. Anything I say now is just… noise."
"You like making noise," Melody said. "You like watching which way they break."
"I like knowing if they can break and re-set correctly," I said. "If she comes out of this still thinking in sermons, that's my answer."
Melody tapped a lace-covered knee.
"And while she's wrestling with theology," she said, "you're heading to the Tower personally. You could have sent Ethan with a toy, or a healer with instructions. Why you?"
"Because they asked for me," I said. "And because some problems you don't outsource."
She huffed.
"Fine. Then entertain me talk about magic." She leaned forward, hair spilling. "How does the story go again? Where did all of this come from, according to the winners?"
"Merlin," I said. "Is the root of modern spell theory. Archsage."
"And no one knows if Merlin was a he, she, or impolite question," Melody said. "Portraits disagree with themselves."
"Which tells you the only important fact," I said. "Merlin sits at the top of the pile. Spells, tiers, the way everyone here thinks about mana at all."
Her eyes sharpened.
"You still think Merlin didn't belong here," she said.
"I think this world had working physics," I said. "Then something rippled time and stapled mana on top. And one very rude person showed up with the fixes that wasn't needed."
She went quiet.
"And tier?" she asked. "If you had to slap a number on Merlin."
"Ten," I said.
"That tier doesn't exist."
"Publicly."
Melody's smile was thin.
"And the towers?" she asked. "Our destination in this charming wagon?"
"Nine towers," I said. "Nine disciplines. Nine original 'students.' Each one built to control how mana is understood, not just how it's used."
She tilted her head.
"And we're visiting…?"
"The first," I said. "The Orientialist Tower."
"Elemental study's of boundaries, inside versus outside," she said. "Your favorite kind of headache."
"And vectors," I said.
Her lips parted.
"Like the ones you throw around," she said. "Force, direction, rerouting momentum. The thing that made your Academy instructors go grey."
"Exactly," I said. "They use vectors, they just don't know that's what they are."
"And you're going to educate them," she said.
"Not today," I said. "Today, I'm here because they broke something and put two people into comas."
She smirked, then dissolved, gothic black dress and all, until the only trace of her was the familiar weight of the sword at my hip.
"Try not to start a doctrinal war in the first ten minutes," her voice brushed my thoughts. "You can always offend them later."
"No promises," I thought back.
***
The Tower doors had been designed to impress people who didn't understand wards.
Huge stone slabs. Carved sigils. Enough subtle detection arrays woven into the arch that walking through felt like being politely frisked by paranoid ghosts.
Two figures waited inside.
The man; thin, white hair pulled back, short beard, dark robe stitched with runes that had seen better dye. Mana coiled in him deep and heavy.
The woman: iron-grey braid, back straight, lines at her eyes that came from laughing and frowning in equal measure. Her magic felt like a thunderhead held politely at arm's length.
"Lord Milton," the man said. "I am Natharion. You may call me Nat if you insist. This is Ewilyn."
Ewilyn inclined her head.
"Welcome to the Orientialist Tower," she said. "Thank you for coming on such short notice."
"Your letter said 'coma' and 'unstable array,'" I said. "That combination moves me."
Nat snorted.
"Good. I was starting to think nothing does, these days."
"Two patients," I said. "One Archmage, one not?"
Ewilyn's mouth tightened, just barely.
"Correct," she said. "If you don't mind, we'll go straight there."
"Lead," I said.
***
We stepped onto the central platform and it rose, smoothly enough that most people wouldn't look twice.
I did.
The arrays etched into the shaft walls are older than half the city. First-generation lift patterns. Thick lines where there should be fine work, redundancies stacked on top of one another like someone kept patching instead of redesigning.
Mana is pouring through them from the core. Too much. Enough to mask micro-failures. If the artifact feeding this thing hiccups, this platform becomes an accelerated physics lesson.
I resist the urge to tell them.
Out on the balconies, robes flash past. Voices echo up.
"…if you treat it as a closed vector—"
"—but the resultant is zero—"
"—Merlin clearly intended—"
It seem students arguing over surface behavior. Reciting diagrams. Nobody asking what mana is, only how to shape it.
Nat and Ewilyn stand beside me, eyes forward.
Their auras feel wrong, in a way only someone else who's gone off the ladder can feel. Not tier stacks. Something deeper. Roots in the frame, not just feet on the scaffolding.
Origin users.
I don't say it aloud.
No point starting that conversation in a lift with no safety rails.
One step at a time.
The platform slows.
"This level," Nat says.
***
The infirmary is quieter than I expected.
Good. It means they don't use it for every stubbed toe.
Beds. Wards. Herbs. A few apprentices with the usual burns and frostbite.
Then: the two that matter.
Archmage first.
Man in his early fifties, lying on his back, breathing slow and steady. Dark blond hair threaded with grey. Strong features slack with sleep.
Internal monologue:
Halbrecht. Interface specialist. Aura coiled in on itself, not empty, not leaking. Like someone hit "pause" on the mind and left the body running.
"Three days," Ewilyn says next to me. "He was working in the central array. There was a surge. We found him on the platform. No physical damage. No curse signature. Nothing."
"Coma," I say.
"So the healers insist," Nat mutters.
I file him away.
Then the girl.
Farther down. Against the wall. Quieter, somehow, even in the same silence.
Young. Early twenties. Gold hair in a braid that someone has redone more out of duty than hope. Freckles. Staff-calluses.
Vectors. There, in the way the mana sits around her. Faint, like chalk marks in the rain, but the structure is familiar. Too familiar.
My chest tightens.
Of all people.
Ewilyn's voice comes, careful.
"She collapsed three years ago," she says. "Lower lab. No backlash, no visible cause. Her body functions. Her mind does not answer. We… keep her here. It seemed wrong to put her in the vaults."
"Name?" I ask, already knowing I won't like the answer.
"Goldwynn Ēadburg von Dornenhain," Nat says.
There it is.
Internal monologue:
The girl who should climb to tier seven. The one who, in another path, stands at the northern breach and holds a vector lattice together long enough for the realm not to burn. Dies on her feet. No medal. Just ash and silence.
Here she is instead.
On a bed.
Unmoving.
Locked away years before she ever gets there.
"Why are you here?" I think, before I can stop myself.
Her chest rises.
Falls.
Nothing else.
I cut the thought off before it goes any further.
"Two comas," I say aloud. "Years apart. And now your interface Archmage knocks himself out playing with the core."
"Yes," Ewilyn says.
"Any official link between his research and her case?" I ask.
"No," Nat says. "Unofficially… he has visited her. Checked records. Asked the same questions you're asking now."
Tried to save her. Failed. Tried again in the wrong place.
Internal monologue:
Of course he did. Of course this isn't clean.
I let my hand hover above Goldwynn's sternum without touching.
There's a flick of mana, deep down. Not gone. Not healthy either. Like a circuit that burned out halfway and never quite reset.
I pull back.
"I'll need their records," I say. "Both of them. Everything you have. Lab notes, disciplinary files, sealed reports. And full schematics of your central array as it is now."
Nat's brows climb.
"You ask for quite a lot, Lord Milton," he says. "Some of those designs are not shown even to senior mages."
"You called me to fix a problem you can't even name," I say. "I can't do that blindfolded."
Ewilyn studies me for a moment, then nods once.
"We'll arrange access," she says. "On-site only. No copies leave the Tower."
"Fine," I say.
Goldwynn, is out of position. Out of time. The Tower carrying secrets it doesn't understand. An Archmage in stasis after poking the core.
Somewhere down the line, this girl is supposed to stand between the realm and annihilation.
Right now she can't even open her eyes.
"Start with her file," I say. "And Halbrecht's research from the last six months. I want to know what he thought he was doing before I open anything."
Nat grunts.
"Ambitious," he says.
"Greedy," I correct. "But you knew that when you wrote the letter."
I look at Goldwynn one last time.
Why…. You weren't supposed to be here. Not like this.
If I can get you out, maybe the north gets its defender back.
If I can't… I need to know why.
"Don't poke either of them without telling me," I add. "No new diagnostics, no experimental blessings. If the field changes while I'm mapping it, I leave."
Ewilyn's mouth twitches.
"You threaten all your prospective patients like this?" she asks.
"Only when I think they might survive," I say.
Goldwynn doesn't move.
But the faintest quiver in the mana around her brushes my senses, like a sleeper turning over in a dream.
I pretend I didn't feel it.
Mysteries first.
Answers later.
If I'm lucky.