The Fractured Tower

“I fucking told you he was still alive!” Rue crowed. “You beautiful bastard, welcome back!”

“Uh... thanks,” Sorin said slowly, like he was having trouble thinking of the words. His eyes drifted down to the stump of her left arm, and his expression sharpened. “You should get that fixed.”

“Haven’t had the money to hire a healer,” she told him.

Sorin looked down at Yoru’s father, still crying on the floor. Blood caked his face, and his outfit was hanging off him in tatters. Someone had pounded his torso like a side of beef, and it wasn’t hard to guess who. The arm might have been the worst of it with the bones poking out through tears in his skin, but it was just the exclamation point on a whole sentence of pain.

“So I heard,” Sorin said. He placed a foot against Yoru’s father’s back and shoved, flipping the Telpike patriarch over. ““An arm for an arm.”

Sorin stepped over Yoru’s father and approached Rue and gestured for her to lift the stump. After a moment’s examination, he said, “Easy enough to fix. There are healers here who could have done it. Here, let me just untie the sleeve so we don’t tear it.”

Yoru wanted to say something, but he didn’t dare to interrupt the work. Rue deserved to have her arm back. They could discuss what Sorin’s return meant afterward, that and... other topics. Yoru couldn’t decide if he felt sympathy or contempt for his father. Probably both. I don’t understand what happened to you, Father. I remember a better man than what you’ve become.

Sorin picked apart the knot in Rue’s sleeve and pushed it up to her shoulder to reveal a scarred stump just before the elbow. When the tunnel had collapsed, Odric had shielded her with his own body, but a thousand-pound slab of stone had come down on that arm, crushing it completely. They’d had to cut it off just to get her free.

Nemari had been the only one thrown far enough back to avoid the collapse, though she’d still been battered into unconsciousness by the smaller chunks of debris. Odric had saved himself and his sister with a combination of Stone Skin and Earth Shaping. Yoru would have been killed if not for Vendis. His best friend had used the barrier in that amulet they’d gotten on Yoru instead of himself.

It was a miracle that five out of six people were still breathing. Yoru refused to cheapen that with bitterness, but his chest still ached when he thought about it. Seeing the scars on Rue’s body brought all that rushing back to the front of his mind.

Rue cried out as the stump split open. New bone jutted out of it, followed by ropes of tendon and muscle racing after as her arm rebuilt itself. The scars became a band of angry red lines wrapped around her bicep, and skin swept down to cover the ligature of bare muscle. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds, ending with fresh fingernails growing in.

“Sorry, I’m a bit out of practice working on other people,” Sorin said.

“Just a little bit,” Rue said, her voice choking. She threw herself at him, hugging him tightly. “Thank you. I didn’t think I’d—They said I should just retire, but I couldn’t give up.”

“Bit young to retire, don’t you think? You barely got started, plus it turns out there’s this whole fate of humanity thing we’re working on.”

That was about the time the rest of the team—again except for Algial—caught up. “The fate of who now?” Nemari asked. “Wait, Rue, your arm!”

Waving her newly grown fingers at the team, Rue said, “I told you he wasn’t dead. No way he’d lose a fight.”

“Uh... Well... Who won and who lost isn’t really important,” Sorin told them.

Nemari gaped at him. “It really fucking is. Is Samael dead or not?!”

“Oh, yes, he’s definitely dead. I just wouldn’t say I won. It turns out the tower was not happy with him breaking his oath. We laid a joint beat down on Samael, then I dragged him back out of liminal space when he tried to run away.”

“I have so many questions,” Rue said. “But those can wait! You’re back. Holy shit, you’re like, rank 30. We’re only at rank 15! How’d you push that high so fast?”

“It’s been an... intense... few weeks,” he said, growing more subdued.

“Sorin, it’s been over two months since the door,” Yoru told him. “And not to change the subject, but why are you destroying my home?”

“Well, when I got out of the trial, I came here first. It seemed like the easiest way to catch up with you all. I didn’t even know if you were alive or still climbing. Then your old man started talking about how he’d cut everyone loose, how there was no agreement without me here. I guess he forgot the last time we had an argument, or he wouldn’t have been complaining about how much money it would have cost him to get Rue’s arm fixed.”

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Yoru’s eyes flickered back to his father involuntarily. He... broke Father’s left arm, just like how Rue’s was cut off.

“Anyway, after we sorted out our difference of opinions, I had him call you guys back. Sorry if I interrupted anything important.”

“Worth it,” Rue said.

“Agreed,” Odric added.

“Yoru. Help... me...”

Yoru looked over at his father. “What was it you said to me? That if I couldn’t abide by your orders, I’d receive no further help, that I could suffer the consequences of my actions? Perhaps you should take some time to reflect on those words, Father. You used to be someone with integrity.”

“Couldn’t... afford it anymore. New world... now. Samael changed... everything.”

There was some truth to that. Things had definitely grown worse from when Yoru was a child. The other high families had become more vicious. They’d sunk to new lows to hold onto their positions, and Yoru’s grandfather had refused to adapt. That was how he’d ended up dead when Yoru was eleven, by willingly blinding himself to what his rivals were willing to do to get ahead.

“I guess that won’t be a problem for you in the future,” Sorin said.

“Too late to go back.”

“Be the change you want to see. Maybe come out of retirement and start climbing again soon. Samael’s dead, and once I clean up his Floor 25 mess, things are going to change in this tower.” Sorin started to turn away, but paused. “I guess if our agreement is over, I’ll go ahead and reclaim our enchanter’s cabinet. I’m sure I can find someone else willing to partner with me. Oh, and Morlin, just so you know, there was no magical spring in that trial. I guess it was just a myth.”

* * *

“Oh God, this tastes so good,” Sorin said, savoring each and every bite. “You would not believe how impossible it was to cook anything in that trial. Everything in a ten-mile radius would come down on you if you so much as lit a campfire, and they’d do it faster if you started cooking.”

The whole team, which included some new guy named Algial who’d been functioning as their front line, was seated in a private dining room that probably cost ten times what it was worth. Sorin was spending the money in Morlin’s purse to pay for it, though, so he wasn’t too concerned.

They’d caught him up on what had been going on outside the trial while he’d been gone. He wasn’t terribly surprised to learn that he’d grossly misjudged how long he’d been in there. With no day-night cycle and the monsters keeping him from sleeping for more than ten or twenty minutes at a time, keeping track of time was all but impossible.

Finding out they’d lost Vendis to Samael’s attack was a blow. Sorin had gotten the briefest explanation, then they’d glossed over it. Yoru was very obviously still hurting, all the more so because his best friend had sacrificed himself. Sorin had gone through that once, when he’d been young the first time. Grief and guilt were an ugly combination, and it had taken him a long time to come to terms with it.

He was happy to see that they’d kept climbing, even if Morlin had done his best to break Yoru off from the team. Odric had taken over as the primary healer again, and Rue had stepped out of a heavy combatant role to function as the team’s scout. That left Nemari on ranged damage and Yoru as the all-arounder, and apparently Algial’s presence had been as much a concession as they could get from Morlin.

“You sticking around?” he’d asked the man, only to get a shrug in return.

Yoru had explained Algial as one of Morlin’s picks for the original team he’d wanted to field. They’d been keeping up with Yoru’s progress as best they could, apparently on standby to jump in and fill a spot if and when someone from the original roster was unable to continue. After Sorin’s presumed death, Morlin had assigned Algial to fill one spot as an experiment, to see if the tower would give him his own mosaic when he passed through an Antechamber with the team.

That hadn’t happened, which didn’t surprise Sorin all that much. With his new understanding of what the mosaics were, it was a much bigger surprise that they existed at all for all the red tower natives. His theory on that was that the tower had created a simplified, stripped-down version and was using their own anima growth to fuel it. The theory had some holes, but the exact mechanics mattered less than the results.

“So, Floor 13. I can probably catch up by the time you’re ready to take on the guardian,” Sorin said. “Maybe if I’m there, the tower will help you out. If not, sorry.”

Algial didn’t seem concerned. “It’d be awesome to have what you all have, but I lived my whole life without it. I’ll survive if the tower doesn’t give it to me. I guess I’ll probably be dropping out at that point, though. You’ll want to push harder than I’m capable of keeping up with if you’re aiming for Floor 25 as fast as possible.”

“Right, I should probably explain all of that.”

“You mentioned something about oaths,” Nemari said. “I take it you finally remembered that missing day?”

“Nope, but the tower showed me its own memory from after we finished Floor 100. Going off that, I did figure out what’s going on, more or less. The short version is that humans weren’t part of the tower originally. The void devoured our home, we fled, and met up with the tower, which agreed to shelter us in exchange for excising the void it was keeping contained inside itself. It calls all of this its reality, which is apparently different from the reality outside the tower.

“Anyway, our ancestors swore an oath to do just that, and the tower is holding all their descendants to it. Climbing is a way to sort of acclimate our souls, to stretch them out and make them stronger, which is why it has to be done incrementally. Once we’re strong enough, as proven by reaching the top, we’re ready to be prepared for man-on-void combat.”

“That’s why you were sent here, to clean up the void?” Nemari asked. “No, that doesn’t make sense. Samael was already sent here, and he’s the one who caused it. The tower would have had no reason to send him here in the first place.”

“No. There’s another reason. It’s kind of complicated, but, you know how nobody knows why our anima and the anima we gain from monsters don’t really function the same way?” Sorin asked. “Yeah. Uh. I know why.”

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