The Fractured Tower

Samael’s vault was impressive, if only in that it was full of stuff that was difficult to acquire on the lower floors. Back in his home tower, Sorin’s own collection of C-ranks was just a heap of unorganized curios and trinkets. He couldn’t honestly even say what was in there, as he’d long ago outgrown the need to add such weak abilities to his repertoire.

How far I’ve fallen, he thought with a smile as he looked at the meticulously cataloged shelves lining the main chamber of the vault. The irony was that while there were a few dozen C-ranks, at least if he could believe the labels, most of the stockpile was actually Es and Ds. Some of them weren’t even that rare, or at least they wouldn’t have been back home. He’d already learned first-hand that certain soulprints he’d taken for granted as widely available were actually incredibly scarce here.

The room was a half-circle, flat on the wall he’d come in from, but with four more doors evenly spaced out in front of him. “The armory,” Urd said, pointing to the left-most door. Going clockwise around the room, he added, “Raw materials and tools, books and scrolls, and Samael’s personal workshop.”

“You’ve cataloged everything from the soulprint repository and the armory already?” Sorin asked.

“Everything I could manage.”

“I’d like to see the lists. It would save me some time. Anything you couldn’t identify, I’ll look at later. I don’t know that I’ll need it, but a list of what’s in the materials storage might also be helpful. There might be enough time to have a handful of new pieces of equipment or soulprints made out of them before I reach the Void Wall.”

“I’ll fetch it at once,” Urd said. He produced another ring of keys to hand off to Sorin. There were five in total, presumably one for each door, including the one he’d removed from the wall.

Sorin entered the workshop with some amount of trepidation. Samael was exactly the kind of person to boobytrap his stuff, and though Urd had claimed to have already gone through the room, Sorin didn’t trust him enough to casually bet his life on it. So it was with great care and a readiness to throw himself to the side that Sorin slowly inserted the key and turned the door knob.

Nothing happened. After a long, tense moment of silence, Sorin released his breath in a slow hiss and shook his head. Maybe I’m too paranoid. I’d have trapped it.

There were a few workstations, including one that was built for handling jewelry. When Urd had claimed Samael liked to work with metal, Sorin had pictured a smithy, but this was another direction. A small, portable furnace rested on a block of steel next to the table, the kind that could be used to melt small amounts of metal, and a shelf with a few finger-thick bars of gold, silver, and the like sat above it.

While Sorin was curious how skilled Samael was, he could tell at a glance that there were no magical pieces at the workstation. Apparently, the man had crafted jewelry for the love of the process, not as a way to gain some advantage when climbing. Or, if he’d been a skilled enchanter, he’d done it elsewhere.

Of more interest was a closed cabinet with a pair of glass doors. A line of thin books filled two shelves, while the third had an assortment of small trinkets. Samael was making soulprints like a crafter? Sorin wondered as he eyed them up. Was this part of his soulprint modification process?

As far as he knew, that wasn’t possible. The soulprint could be imbued into the object, but not changed. Any attempt to do so simply meant a failed—and often expensive—mistake. It was only inside a soulspace that soulprints became malleable enough to combine, and even then, the climber risked soul damage and the loss of abilities if the process was performed incorrectly.

Opening the cabinet, Sorin reached for the first book and started flipping through it. It was more of a journal than anything, and in the notes, he saw many of the same questions he’d wrestled with. Samael had his own theories, some so outlandish that Sorin wasn’t sure how his counterpart had come up with them.

That was followed by a study of the local economics, complete with comparisons between his home tower and this one. In that, he’d faced similar issues to Sorin’s. The currency was different. The values were different. Some soulprints were rare that had been common in his home tower, and the opposite was also true.

Frowning, Sorin started flipping through them faster. If he’d held any plans to visit the green tower in the future, he might have found the information useful, but as it stood, it was pointless, and his time was limited. More and more journals joined the stack as he discarded them, slowing only briefly when Samael got to his notes on the people he’d partnered with once he’d started climbing.

Sorin didn’t recognize the names, and he assumed most of the climbers were dead now, but he set two journals aside to hand off to Nemari and Yoru, just in case they knew one or more of Samael’s victims. A lot of times, no one ever found out how a climber met their end, but the journals might give a few people some peace of mind.

He was onto the second shelf before he finally found what he was looking for. Samael had been tampering with soulprints. It seemed the technique was known in the green tower, but also considered high level. The notes got messy there, though, making them difficult to follow.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

It started with Samael’s recording of what he knew to be true, followed by what he was guessing at, though he’d made it seem like he was confident in the overall concept of the process. It was just the small details he’d felt he needed to sort out. That idea was disproven by the massive amount of annotations marring the text.

Fully half of the foundational concepts had been crossed out, with new notes scribbled in the margins or between the lines. It was so bad that there were full paragraphs Sorin struggled to read, spots where the original words had been defaced, and then the annotations had sharp, dark lines slashed through them to be replaced with yet another new set.

He must have figured it out, but it was obviously a process getting there, Sorin decided as he tried to follow the makeshift timeline the annotation process had created.

The gist of it seemed to be that there was a sort of transitional point where the crystallized anima pattern passed out of its vessel and into the user’s soulspace. Mucking around with them involved somehow trapping them in that transition, or maybe pushing a soulspace beyond its original bounds to overlap the transition.

However it was done, that was where a soulprint needed to be held in order to modify the matrix. Doing so was simultaneously a delicate process and one that had to be completed in the blink of an eye, because the physical vessel couldn’t tolerate the procedure for longer than that. Samael had taken extensive notes on the various soulprints he’d accidentally destroyed while practicing the technique, and, if he was right, the rank of the soulprint or the material it was anchored to made no practical difference in how long it allowed itself to be modified before breaking.

Fascinated now, Sorin lost half an hour reading and reading Samael’s log of his experiments. It was disturbingly easy to follow the man’s line of reasoning, so much so that if Sorin hadn’t had such a firm belief in himself, he might have worried at how similarly their minds worked. He suffered from no such identity crisis, however, having long since done the necessary soul-searching to discover who he was and what he stood for.

Admittedly, it was only because I was forced to when that psychosis demon got hold of me back on Floor 40-something. 42? 45? Somewhere around there. Learned my lesson there. S-rank mental defense soulprint as soon as I could hold one. Man, I miss having Clarity of Mind just for the reassurance it provides that I’m never being influenced by anyone or anything.

Eventually, he realized that Urd was standing in the doorway with a small portfolio tucked under one arm. He didn’t physically jump in surprise, but Sorin was horrified at his own carelessness. Even with some sort of stealth soulprint, which he suspected Urd had, letting a potential enemy get that close was inexcusable.

“Is that the list I asked for?” he asked, nothing in his voice betraying his shock.

“It is, sir.”

“Set it on the table, please. I’ll look over that next.”

“If I might presume to ask, are you able to follow what Lord Samael wrote about?”

“I’m still wrapping my head around it. Samael himself didn’t seem to understand the process that well,” Sorin said. “I’m assuming he managed to piece enough together to do at least a little bit of tinkering, but I haven’t gotten to that point yet.”

“That’s heartening to hear. Is there anything else I can assist you with?” Urd asked.

“I just need some time for the moment. Actually, can you gather up the climbers’ guides for Floor 18 and up? I’ll add that to my list of reading materials.”

In truth, once Sorin had verified he had everything he needed, he was going to take it all with him. With dimensional storage finally on the table, there was no reason he couldn’t bring the guides out into the field. Climbers did it all the time, though only with copies. No one wanted to risk losing the only source of knowledge for a new floor, even if they weren’t keen to share the knowledge outside friends and family.

In this case, Sorin couldn’t afford to wait. If all that was available was the originals, then he’d take them with him. Between that and the new soulprints and gear he might liberate from Samael’s vaults, the way forward would be relatively safe.

In theory, at least. Not like the tower is ever truly safe.

* * *

Finally, finally he begins to take this seriously, Urd thought to himself.

Sorin’s style was very different from Samael’s, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Samael had failed, after all. In ten years, the best he’d managed was to check the void’s advance at the cost of thousands of lives. Maybe this new emissary of the tower would accomplish what his predecessor could not.

Urd hoped for tangible results, and soon. Lanir might be convinced to reunite his forces with the loyalists left at the core of the Hellions, and they desperately needed that combined power to regain control over Hantso’s faction.

Though, Sorin seems less inclined to tolerate that portion of the business. If he does manage to exterminate the void, I suppose Hantso would no longer be necessary. It might be a risk to eliminate him early, but if it breaks his power, it could result in a temporary weakening that serves as the foundation for long-term strength.

Either way, the true Hellions had lost control of the streets. Urd had held off on ordering any dramatic moves up to this point, but he was starting to get an idea of what kind of man the new master of the Black Hellions was, and he suspected that the organization would be used for resources to empower an elite strike team, then left behind.

That was just fine by Urd. All he wanted to do was anything and everything he could to help Sorin prepare for his mission. If that man broke the void, then disappeared from Floor 0, never to be seen again, well, Urd wouldn’t complain.

He left Sorin in the vaults and strode down halls that were far too empty for his tastes. There were threats to the Hellions’ power to be handled now that Urd knew the new master had no interest in keeping those resources. Better to break Hantso’s faction now and reclaim the remnants than to let him continue to build power.

Urd strode into the room of one of his lieutenants, a thick-limbed, burly man with a wild beard that spilled across his chest. The man was sitting in a chair, dragging a whetstone down the length of a sword with a half-eaten bowl of stew still steaming on the table next to him.

“What’s up, boss?”

“We have work to do,” Urd said with a venomous smile.

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