The cold, hard floor leeched the last traces of warmth from Erika's body through his thin clothes. The weakness from exhaustion was one thing; worse was the hollow, sinking debility rising from his core. The Marks on his arms hung like two spent ingots of cold iron, weighing down the bone, leaving his whole arms numb and prickling. But more insistent than that was the tightening, twisting cramp in his stomach—hunger. Raw, physical hunger, a merciless hand wringing his gut.
Since being torn from his village and swallowed by the Sanctum's vast machinery, fear, pain, and confusion had taken turns. He'd almost forgotten this most primal, bodily need. Now, with his strength spent and his mind stretched taut, it rebelled viciously, reminding him: You are still just a mortal. You get cold. You get weak. You starve.
Had all the struggle, the running, the endurance… just been luck? Like a leaf tossed in a gale, seeming to dance and fight in the air, but with no control over its path, only the futile prayer not to shatter when the wind finally dropped.
Helplessness flooded him completely, a tide drowning every limb. He couldn't even lift his arm, letting them fall like broken puppet strings to the cold floor. His fingertips brushed dust—gritty, real.
He couldn't clearly remember how he'd 'fallen' in here. The way back? The scrap heap of energy husks, the terrifying man who created charred death with a gesture… it all felt like a memory viewed through warped glass. An exit might lurk in the shadow of any shelf. Or it might not exist at all. Maybe they'd just fallen into a more intricate trap.
A bitter taste filled his mouth. The corner of his lip twitched in a soundless, mirthless parody of a smile.
"Ha… so this… is how other powers operate…" His voice, a dry rasp, echoed faintly in the silent well, brimming with utter fatigue and a sense of absurd resignation. "Lock us… in a place full of gibberish… to starve? To go mad? Or… just wait to be drowned by knowledge? Hah…"
The laugh was brittle, broken. Worse than a sob.
Then—
The figure beside him, who had been curled into a statue of despair with his face buried in his knees, jerked violently.
Not a tremor of weakness. This was a full-body convulsion, as if struck by a current or pierced by a sudden, shocking thought.
His head snapped up. Dust and tear-tracks smudged his face, but his ice-blue eyes blazed with an intensity that was utterly alien to the surrounding despair—a wild, feverish light, kindled by some spark from deep memory or desperate intuition.
"No… that's not it…" Loren's voice was hoarse, yet carried a strange, ironclad certainty. He tried to struggle up, his knees buckling, sending him back down. He didn't care. He clawed at the nearest shelf, nails digging into leather spines, his gaze raking the endless walls of books as if truly seeing them for the first time.
"A palace of knowledge…" he panted, wrenching the words out, syllable by painful syllable, as if pulling them from some sealed archive, "…can only be breached… by knowledge!"
The words landed in Erika's mental silence like a stone in still water. His vacant eyes shifted. He managed to turn his head, looking at the trembling, agitated Loren. His own lips were cracked. "Knowledge?" he whispered, voice weak and bewildered. "We… can't read any of it…" He glanced at a nearby open tome filled with obscure sigils; the script alone made his temples throb. "What… knowledge?"
If they couldn't understand the words, what use was 'knowledge'? It was just another wall, more despairing than stone.
But Loren seemed not to hear, or was utterly consumed by his own racing thoughts.
Erika stared blankly. Hunger and exhaustion had rusted his mind. He couldn't follow Loren's sudden, frantic leap. He only saw the noble begin to scan the shelves with new desperation, his eyes no longer fixed on text, but searching for… a pattern? An arrangement? Something Erika couldn't perceive?
In this silent pit of despair, the sudden shift was like a weak but stubborn flame, igniting a fragile, unsettling hope—or another form of madness.
Erika lay on the cold floor, hunger and weakness dragging at his consciousness like lead weights. He watched Loren's frenzy with more confusion than inspiration. Wasn't thrashing around just wasting their last shreds of energy? Maybe conserving strength, waiting… for something, anything… was the lesser evil.
Loren was beyond hearing. The burn on his cheek stood out livid in the gloom. His eyes burned with a mix of terror, defiance, and a near-delirious focus. Giving up on standing, he used his dusty, scraped hands to drag his feeble body across the floor, toward the nearest shelf—the second tier, which required him to look up.
The movement was clumsy, painful. A wounded animal dragging itself through muck. Each reach, each pull, came with ragged, shattered gasps that echoed in the silence, tightening Erika's chest.
"Think… Erika," Loren grunted between heaving breaths, his voice strained but oddly clear. "Before he left… the books he consulted…"
He paused, gulping air, and pointed a shaking finger at the lower shelves they had touched and discarded.
"All… from down here." His eyes bored into those volumes as if trying to burn a hole through them. "For someone of his power… the books we can reach… that he kept within easy grasp… must be knowledge he understands… or needs!"
He turned his head, sweat cutting tracks through the grime on his face. His gaze was fever-bright. "You… you keep what you use most… what you need… closest. Right?! Whether it's a tool… or knowledge!"
Erika's vacant eyes focused a fraction more. He pushed against the floor, managing to prop his upper body against the shelf behind him. Loren's words were a pebble dropped into his murky thoughts, stirring a faint ripple. He looked at the 'gibberish' books, then up, into the lightless layers of shelves above.
If the bottom held knowledge the man 'understood' or 'needed'—making it indecipherable to them—then…
"You mean…" Erika's voice was still a dry scrape, tentative, "the higher up… the more… basic? Ancient? Or… there might be something… we could understand?"
He paused, considering a bleaker possibility. "But… it could also be… stuff even he doesn't understand. Or cares about." More obscure, more useless, more insane.
Loren, now slumped at the base of the shelf, looked up into the darkness. A flicker of doubt crossed his face, then was swallowed by harder resolve. He let his head fall back against the wood, utterly spent, but his eyes remained fixed above.
"No… other choice," he breathed, the words final, yet threaded with a new, wilder speculation. "Maybe… we're looking at it wrong…"
He gathered his strength, and his next words came out low, almost mystical.
"What if this… isn't a 'tower' at all?" The ice in his eyes gleamed in the eerie light. "We feel it going up… and up… But what if we're under the Sanctum? What if this 'height' is an illusion… or some kind of… folded space we can't comprehend?"
The idea struck Erika, made him look up again at the consuming dark. Underground? Illusion? Folded space? It was far beyond his understanding, yet in this place where all logic was broken, any madness seemed… faintly possible.
Loren caught his breath. That last spark of thought seemed to ignite a desperate, final hope in his eyes.
"Maybe… we can climb out up there." He stared into the light-eating blackness as if it were a passage, not a dead end. "If it really leads… out. And not to more of this cursed nonsense."
Climb?
Erika looked at the soaring, near-vertical 'wall' of books. He felt his own state—struggling just to sit up. A wave of absurdity and deeper weakness washed over him. It sounded even more impossible than deciphering the texts.
But Loren's words had done it. They had pried open a crack in the absolute silence and despair. Even if the crack led to nothing, or to a fatal fall… it was a direction. An active one. Not just waiting to be judged, or to starve.
Erika licked his cracked lips. The pain in his gut, the numbness in his arms, remained. He looked at the collapsed but bright-eyed Loren, then at the dizzying book-wall.
Maybe… he wasn't the only one going mad.
He drew a shallow breath—the air was still stale—and marshaled his strength, trying to make his own trembling arm reach for the edge of the nearest shelf.
"How… do we climb?" he asked, his voice still gravelly, but no longer completely empty.
"With the books." Loren gasped, pointing at the heavy, solid volumes around them. "We… stack them. Layer by layer… Like a ladder. I think… maybe… it might work."
The idea was both mad and primitive, but it offered a clear action: upward. Erika had no better options. He nodded, swallowing down the weakness rising in his throat and the cramp in his gut. He forced himself fully upright, legs wobbling, and moved toward the nearest shelf.
The first attempts were clumsy, exhausting. The books varied wildly in size, thickness, and binding. Some were far heavier than seemed possible, as if filled with lead, not paper. They had to select the more uniformly sized, sturdily bound ones. Erika pulled them from the lower shelves while Loren, kneeling on the floor and fighting his own pain, tried to pile them one upon another, spines facing out, creating as flat a surface as possible.
Dust churned around them, a grey fog in the cold light, choking their coughs. Sweat quickly soaked through Erika's ragged novice robe, stinging his eyes. The ache in his arms and the hollow throb of his Marks persisted; every lift felt like spending his life's reserves. Loren's fingers were cut by rough corners and possible metal edging, blood beading, but he just wiped them on his already-filthy clothes and reached for the next book.
They worked in grim silence. Only harsh breaths, the solid thud of books settling, and the soft rustle of falling dust. In this grand prison of knowledge, they were committing a kind of desecration—turning these sacred texts into crude, primitive bricks.
Slowly, a lopsided, precarious 'tower' of books took shape beside the shelf, roughly twice a man's height. It was the limit of their current strength. It swayed slightly. Every new addition made it groan with a worrying creak, as if ready to collapse at any moment.
"I'll… go up first," Erika rasped, his voice rough from strain. He was slightly stronger than Loren, or perhaps it was sheer stubbornness driving him. Loren didn't argue, just nodded, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the structure. He braced his back and shoulder against the lower layers, trying to add stability.
Erika took a shaky breath, wiped his sweaty, grimy hands on his trousers, and carefully chose his holds—avoiding the most precarious-looking corners. He grabbed the protruding spine of a stout volume and tentatively placed a foot on the edge of a book at the base.
Groan—
The tower complained, sinking slightly. Erika's heart jumped to his throat. He steadied himself, incrementally shifting his weight, then lifted his other leg. It was like walking a razor's edge; every movement was met with the structure's protest and the fear of a sudden slip.
He climbed slowly, his knuckles white with strain, his arms and legs trembling from both weakness and tension. When he finally reached the top, his height now barely level with the second shelf, he was seeing spots from the effort. He clung to the solid edge of the main shelf, anchoring himself, before daring to look up.
Above, the darkness was still absolute. The well was too tall; their pathetic 'tower' didn't even reach the third shelf. But Erika noticed a detail: at this height, the dust on the shelf boards was far thicker than below, coating the lower halves of the books like a blanket of grey-white felt. Did that… support part of Loren's idea? This area wasn't often touched. The higher, the more forgotten. Maybe there was something older, more basic, or simply abandoned up there?
He strained his eyes, trying to pierce the dense blackness for any glimmer of light different from the books' cold glow—a crack of an exit, anything. But the dark was viscous, impenetrable. He could make out only the nearby shelf outlines and the vague, climbing shadows farther up.
Just as he was trying to focus, hoping for a sign—
A sudden, ominous shudder traveled up through the tower beneath him!
It wasn't from his movement. It came from the base. Followed by Loren's stifled yell and the chaotic slither and crash of shifting books!
"Erika! Look out—!"
Too late.
The book under Erika's foot slid violently away. The entire precarious structure, strained by his weight and the disturbance of his climb, reached its breaking point. Key supporting volumes shifted under awkward angles or their own weight, triggering a chain reaction.
CRASH—RUMBLE—TUMBLE—!!!
The leaning tower gave way. Like a sandcastle whose foundation was washed out, it collapsed.
Erika had time only for a choked cry before weightlessness seized him. He scrabbled for the fixed shelf, his fingers just brushing the cold, rough edge of a spine, and then he was falling, backward, amid the avalanche of books, toward the hard floor below.
The world spun. The air rushed past. The roar of tumbling books and Loren's scream filled his ears.
The last things he saw were the indifferent darkness high above and the looming shadows of heavy volumes hurtling down toward his face.
Then—a brutal impact as his back slammed into the unyielding floor. And a cascade of pummeling blows as books rained down upon him. A thick cloud of dust erupted, swallowing him whole.