And more because I feel like it
Ythfas stood in the small, unassuming doorway, and gazed out into the vast auditorium. Shaanam, the felhunter at his side, twitched his tentacles nervously, whimpering, inasmuch as a demon could be said to whimper. The warlock reached down to scratch its scaly head, sharing the beast’s unease. The constant howl of the nether wind, his companion for these many years, was muffled and barely audible - his connection to the demonic realm thin and tenuous as he stood on that threshold.
Since Altena had first shared her discovery of the Tower of Secrets, there had been mystery after enigma within its walls. The way its locked doors opened only to a series of notes on a satyr’s pipes. The way blood spilled on its floor was almost instantly absorbed without a trace. The incomprehensible whispers that echoed in its halls at night, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.
But its greatest mystery had always been the catacombs that twisted beneath it. The labyrinthine passages defied all efforts at cartography. A room that was behind a series of left turns and down some stairs would, the next day, be found after two sharp right turns. It had been difficult to make use of the catacombs at first, until he and his servants had discovered the trick to navigating them: Once a room had been found, one could always find it again unerringly, simply by walking while thinking about it.
The key was to focus on the destination, not the journey. Master Ythfas found in that, a profound life lesson, and was fond of pointing it out to every initiate who inevitably got lost trying to find their way through the catacombs. The higher ranks would stifle a smile as he would scold yet another initate: "Lift your fool eyes off your feet and keep them on the prize. That goes for life as well as the catacombs of my tower."
But this... This was unprecedented. In setting up a winepress in the catacombs, his servants had opened what had appeared to be a small storage closet door, and found this amphitheater. No mere room, this, but a vast acoustic chamber, with a stage, a podium, a slate-board, and two hundred desks arrayed in rows rising away from it. The field of magical suppression at the doorway left little doubt what was meant to be taught here.
Meant to be.
Was it mere coincidence that he had recruited a competent instructor at last, and then this room should be found only days later?
Ythfas was forced to wonder again, as he had so many times before, what purpose this tower had once served. How did it come to be so perfect for his needs? What had become of its builders? These were, perhaps, the tower’s most closely guarded secrets.
But again, to Master Ythfas, there could be only one answer: The Tower existed because he had been meant to find it, and make use of it. Fate’s hand, subtle though it might sometimes be, was often blatant in the affirmation of his glorious destiny.
He turned to the nervous slave behind him. "Have my sigil burned into the podium and set in the tile of the stage."
He had written the book some years ago, more to codify and solidify what he had learned, than with any intent that it should eventually be read. There had been only one copy: the original text in his own angular script. Vanity had caused him to have it bound in demon skin, embossed with his personal glyph on the cover and spine, cornered with truesilver braces, the pages gilded in gold. It was a startlingly beautiful book on the outside, though the methods and formulae written on its pages now seemed amateurish and ridden with ignorant mistakes.
In a bout of nostalgia, he had opened it once nearly a year ago, perplexed that he had understood so little of the forces his boyish mind was only beginning to grasp at the time of the writing. The rudiments of demonic bindings, the channeling of shadow, the manipulation of entropy; all of these things were new to him then, and his hypotheses on each of them had been proven so very wrong in the intervening years. The young man that had penned those theories could not possibly have grown into the warlock he had become. And yet he had.
And now, the book was missing. There was no mistaking the blank place in his personal library; the gap that should not be. An attempt had been made, however hasty, to arrange the books more evenly on the shelf, to disguise the book’s absence. But Ythfas had known those three bookcases for so long, lived with them often as his only friends, that such efforts were futile.
Curiously, his irritation at the book’s absence was tempered by a certain pride. To steal from the Master’s private quarters would certainly invoke a very slow death, terrifying even in the Tower of Secrets where even minor infractions carried punishments on the cruel side of harsh. No one had ever laid eyes on the pages of that book but himself, and now, someone had found his early work valuable enough to risk the most horrible of punishments simply for a glance inside it.
He allowed himself a smile, running his fingers over the dust-free place on the shelf where it should have been, holding the candelabra aloft to check the other shelves, assuring himself at a glance that the other books were in their proper place. Only that one was missing. So it was.
Closing the door quietly behind him, he emerged into his bedchambers. The sleeping form of Swallowtail shifted under the silken sheets as he brought the dim light into the room, but she did not wake. He was careful to make no sound as he made his way to the spiral stairs leading to the observatory. The carpeted stairs swallowed the sounds of his footfalls as he ascended, and their shadow soon blocked out the flickering glow of his candles.
The observatory was, to all appearances, without walls or ceiling. Only several columns throughout the room, supporting nothing, broke the flat and empty marble floor. The stars and moon illuminated the room as if it stood in the open air. But of course, it did not. An ancient enchantment simply kept that portion of the tower invisible, the better to see the ocean crashing in foamy attacks against the cliffs below, and the peaceful rows of his new vineyard in full summer bloom under the night sky.
But the observatory was not merely a place to observe the surroundings. No, one of the tower’s many secrets, one of its most closely guarded ones, was that the observatory had been built to observe the goings on within the tower. Not without.
He ran his finger along the carvings in one of the columns, closing his eyes. When he opened them, it too had gone transparent. Instead of a column, he saw a scene in miniature, a tiny figure in a darkened room, deep in the catacombs below. A single tallow candle burned on a desk, and a boy, one of the slaves, hunched over the missing book.
A slave boy, charged, no doubt with cleaning the master’s chambers while he had been away on some errand. The vest with the livery of his house was draped over the back of a chair, hastily thrown off in his hurry to open the book and glean what secrets he could from it. No doubt he had hoped to return the book without his theft ever being noticed, but now, though he did not now it, he had been caught.
A surge of pity welled up in him. To kill the boy, even to Ythfas, seemed an injustice in a way. Certainly, what he had done warranted it, and to let the deed go unpunished would sow the seeds of chaos and insurrection among the others, but there would be no joy in the execution of the boy’s punishment. He was, after all, just a foolish boy. Ythfas’s own youth could be recounted as a series of acts equally foolish. But those were gentler times, and the books he had borrowed had never been so dangerous as that one.
And still, there was that swell of pride. The boy honored him by risking so much to read the words from his pen. Had he ever been flattered with such sincerity by his slaves? Ythfas sighed.
He watched the boy read, turning pages eagerly. Even hungrily. All the while, his mind raced for some way to spare the boy’s life. The tower’s laws were immutable and quite unforgiving, but he was, after all, the Master, and if he decided that the child should merely lose an eye, or be flogged and branded, who would dare to question his mercy?
But then, how long after would he have to wait before something far more dangerous from his collection went missing? His mind went to the artifacts scattered around his room, each in its own place. The talismans and trinkets, devices and explosives from his workshop. The chained essence of a green dragon that he kept locked away, even from himself. What if they were to fall into the hands of an ignorant boy such as this? How many would die from their careless misuse?
As he contemplated these things, the boy suddenly rose to his feet, rubbing his eyes in fatigue. He lifted his taper and waved it into the gloom of the otherwise unlit chamber. Nearby, a squirrel in a makeshift cage on the floor scampered at the motion, and the boy reached inside, catching the rodent in one hand.
The boy’s voice was harsh, guttural, but his pronunciation of the demonic chant was nearly perfect. Soon, the squirrel’s efforts at escape doubled, it thrashed and writhed in the boy’s grip, but could not escape.
And then its flesh began to rot.
The boy had managed to cast a rudimentary corruption, and before long, fur and skin fell away, muscle and tendon disintegrated, and only the skeleton of the squirrel remained. The boy squeezed, and even the bones became powder.
Ythfas gasped. The boy had managed to glean enough from the book to draw on the power of the nether, the pure chaos of entropy.
Perhaps there was a way to preserve the boy’s life after all.