As I looked around in awe, mixed with just a touch of vertigo, Felicity was looking at Gareth strangely. "You told us this was a dungeon."

"It is one," he said, looking a bit confused at her accusing tone.

She shook her head. "A dungeon is a cavern belowground, created by a core. This... this is no cavern. I think it's not a dungeon at all, but a tower."

He frowned at the words. "We are belowground in a cavern. You saw the first floor. A tower is a fortification built aboveground."

"Yes, just like a dungeon is a prison to hold criminals. Does your... version... of the world know nothing of towers?"

"A thing that is like a dungeon, but is not, and is called a tower? No, in all my years I have never heard this term."

I blinked at him. "We have historical records of adventurers in towers going all the way back to the Third Age at least. Once there were a few dozen of them, but they've been diminishing over time, vanishing as they are conquered. Today, only five are known to still exist in the world. This would be the sixth."

"...a tower is a dungeon that can only be completed once, and then it vanishes?"

"A tower isn't a dungeon," Felicity said. "Towers are divine creations, not born of cores at all. Typically each floor is wildly different from each other one, often existing in a pocket dimension rather than the Prime Material plane, and they're often populated by strange and unique monsters. They're meant to test and try those who pass through them, and whoever reaches the end first is granted a powerful reward from whichever Gods sponsor the tower, such as an artifact or even a wish. And then they vanish, their purpose fulfilled."

Gareth considered that. "As the kith of the Sixth Age are so powerful, how do any remain intact at all?"

"Because like the library, not all of the trials of a tower can be conquered through might alone. There are things in some of them that no one truly understands, and some monsters too powerful for any modern delvers to withstand, things not seen in the outside world."

"And towers don't have breakouts the way dungeons do," I said. "That would explain why this hasn't drawn attention yet." I shook my head slowly. "A tower. Practically in my backyard. You know how crazy this is, right Felicity?"

"I think it's a blessing," she said. "One we should definitely be grateful for." Then, to Gareth, "How does the boat work?"

Yeah, yeah, Felicity. I don't need hints dropped. Buy the land already. And knowing this now, could I really afford not to?

"The boat sails by itself," Gareth said. "You board, and it flies you to a nearby island. Board it again to return to this dock." He stepped into the boat and beckoned to us to follow. It was a fairly small boat with two padded benches, one behind the other, each big enough to seat three comfortably. Gareth sat down in front, and Felicity and I by unspoken agreement took the bench behind him. A moment after we were all seated, a breeze arose and filled the sail, and the boat began to move.

We sat in silence for a minute or two, just taking this all in, until Felicity glanced over the side and gasped. "Look!"

Looking over, I saw a group of creatures about 20 feet below our boat, with long, sleek, silver-blue scaled bodies and heads like fish, but big feathery wings and clawed feet like birds, soaring through the sky.

She clearly had no idea what those were, and neither did I. "Have you ever seen something like that before?" I asked Gareth.

He shook his head. "Outside of this place, no." A faint smile crossed his lips. "Odd fish, but well-suited to a sea like no other." He looked off in the distance, then pointed. "There. We approach our destination."

An island slowly began to grow on the horizon, looking like a big volcanic mountain poking up out of... nothing. There was no water, nor a continent for it to be sitting atop; it rested on a giant block of earth that crumbled away beneath it, shaped more or less like an iceberg but made of stone and soil. The island looked to be more or less round in shape, maybe three miles across, with a steep climb to the summit starting maybe a mile in. Nearer the 'shore,' strange conifers dotted the landscape. I would call them evergreens, except about half of them had needles white as snow, while the rest bore bright yellow needles.

As the boat drew near the island, Gareth said, "the goal of this floor is to reach the top of the mountain. At the summit is a doorway leading to a staircase to the next floor. The danger here is minimal; the island is inhabited by phantasmal spirits that can be driven off with even light amounts of magic. Do not let them touch you and all will be well."

"...and if they do?" I asked.

"Their touch can chill and paralyze. Allowing this to happen while climbing a rock face would be unwise," he said drily.

"So there's actual climbing involved, not just hiking?"

"At some points. Most of it can be made on foot, but not all."

Oh, lovely. I'd never gone rock climbing before. I'd done climbing walls a time or two in college with enchanted harnesses to catch students in case they fell, but actual mountains?

I put up a barrier spell around the three of us. "Will this slight magic do?"

Gareth nodded. The boat soon pulled itself ashore, beaching itself on a convenient patch of sand, and the three of us got out. Ahead, the beach slowly transitioned to grass, the ground sloping gently upward for a ways before angling sharply upwards. The branches of the strange trees swayed lightly in a gentle breeze, and a single ghostly figure stood before us, maybe forty yards off.

It slowly began to approach, coming close enough that I could make out the form of a dwarven woman, dressed as a simple laborer. Her mouth opened and a mournful wail issued forth, low-pitched and anguished, somehow calling to my mind the imagery of a mother who had lost her children.

Felicity's helmet turned to look at the woman, then at us. "I think that's some sort of bane sidhe," she said.

"Huh? A banshee?" I asked. "I thought those were myths. And their cries are supposed to strike dead anyone who hears them, but we're still here..."

She shook her head. "Banshees are tales told to creep out kids around campfires, but they have roots in a true being. The bane sidhe, two words, is a spirit of grief from the fey realm. If a fey dies under conditions of overwhelming sorrow, sometimes their spirits will not move on, and they haunt the realm, spreading the grief and despair that defined their end to all around them. Since the Fast Keys sealed off most travel to other planes, they've been mythologized over the centuries, and the real deal are hardly ever seen on Mundus because summoners have little reason to want to call one up."

"All right. But that's a dwarf," I pointed out. "Can kith become bane sidhe?"

"Not that I've heard of. But that spirit does seem very similar."

I looked to Gareth. "Any insight here?"

He shrugged. "Don't let it touch you. It might be nice to have a cleric along who can turn them." He glanced at Felicity. "That is not within your power, is it?"

She shook her head. "Some paladins can, but in my ministry I've had little contact with spirits or undead, and so never trained in the relevant techniques."

He looked to me. "Then I will leave repelling them in your capable hands."

He began to lead us towards the mountain, and we walked fast enough that the slow-moving phantasm couldn't keep up. There weren't too many of them at first, and if they approached too aggressively a simple force bolt sent them tumbling away from us. But as we got nearer to the mountain, the spirits grew more numerous.

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They called out to us, and images flashed through my mind. Loss of family. Loss of lovers. Loss of a home, of treasure and prized possessions. One of them, striking in its clarity, imbued an image of an arcane rune into my mind, one that I had never seen before in my study.

"Hold up, did you guys notice that?"

Gareth seemed entirely oblivious to it. "Their cries of sorrow?"

"There are... undertones to it," Felicity said. "Thoughts, ideas. I can almost feel, smell, even taste some of their experiences. Almost."

I pulled out my notepad. "Well I can feel one of them." I quickly sketched out the rune, a mass of spiky lines radiating outward from a central body, vaguely reminiscent of one hand crossed atop another with the fingers spread wide. Also, right at the echo of my consciousness, a name. "I think this is called trenna," I mused, writing the name down under the drawing.

Thankfully the bane sidhe, or whatever they were, moved slowly enough that I could afford the time to sketch out the drawing. I packed the notebook up again and loosed a rapid flurry of force bolts to bat away approaching spirits, and we continued walking. The grade turned more vertical, and it was slow going but not painfully so. Not yet at least.

"Are there usually this many?" Felicity asked as a swarm of about a dozen spirits drifted towards us. A jumble representing kith of all races, mainly adults, though one of them took the appearance of a little goblin girl, maybe 8 or 9 years old.

"Yes, this is rather typical. The swarm will grow thicker as we go higher." He looked at me. "Can you hold them?"

"I'm good for now," I said, "but if they get much worse I'm gonna be draining mana quickly."

"How do you handle them with limited castings?" Felicity asked.

"A simple protective aura such as Brad cast wards their touch away," he said, "and I do not find their cries discomforting as you seem to. You will likely find that its effect diminishes as your Level increases."

Yeah. That's sure to happen in the near future! Even in Gareth's time, it had taken him decades to climb to his current Level.

Nevertheless, I held back a bit to conserve my power, letting the waves of spirits come closer to us before using area spells to blast an entire group away from us. Their cries were a bit disconcerting, filling me with flashes of painful insight into the griefs of lost souls. No more new runes, but I was becoming far more acquainted with the shattering pain of losing a loved one than I ever wanted to be.

When the terrain became impassable, Gareth pointed. "From here to there, we'll need to climb."

"Wait," I said. I'd used stone shaping offensively in the dungeon where I met Gareth. Maybe here...? I reached out with my power and pulled, drawing stone out of the mountainside and forming a rough staircase. "There." I slumped forward a little, hands on my knees, closing my eyes, waiting a bit to regain my strength.

"That looked draining," Gareth said. "Are you sure that was wise?"

I just nodded. "I'll be fine. Climbing would have been physically draining to me, and I can recover from the energy variety a lot more quickly." As more spirits began to approach, I just growled to myself. Reaching into my spatial bag, I pulled out a blank rune plate and stylus, etching a simple schema. Barrier. Spirit. Repulsion. Distance. Ingress. "Hey Felicity, can you charge this?" I asked, sitting down on the ground and setting it beside me.

She nodded, crouching down and pressing a finger to the ingress rune, channeling mana into it. A barrier circle sprang to life, pressing the spirits back a good forty feet from us. "I think this is a good place to take a short rest," I said as I began to circulate.

Gareth had been watching intently as I prepared the rune plate. "That is Sixth Age enchanting? The thing you do as a profession?"

"No, that's just a very simple one-off. Five runes and it's all done, anyone with a few months' training could do the same. Professional enchanting schemas are a lot more complicated, typically involving hundreds of runes. I think the most complex one in our project is around two thousand."

"And you spend all day etching such large rune patterns into plates?"

I laughed. "Oh wow, that would be an awful job! No, we call them schemas, and most of what I do is designing them. We have specialized spells on our rune tablets that let us manipulate images of the runes, to work out a design that will be effective. When you get up past about a dozen runes or so in a schema, it's not just 'make a spell that does this effect' anymore; you have to worry about the speed of energy flow, about adjacent energy patterns interfering with one another, keeping mana leakage under control, tons of little details like that. Once the plan is ready, there's a simple device that will inscribe it onto a plate so you don't need to carve the whole thing by hand and risk making mistakes."

"I see. And the thing you're doing now? With power slowly swirling about your aura? I've noticed it before, but it is much more active now."

"Circulating. It's an ætheric technique. Kind of like breathing hard after exerting yourself, to get all the weariness out of your blood and replace it with fresh oxygen, except instead of my throat and mouth, my primary mana channels run through my arms and hands. So I flow mana in the left, out the right, let it dissipate a bit, in the right, out the left, let it dissipate, and repeat. Just about everybody does it almost unconsciously if they're working with magic, but circulating a bit more actively helps restore your core mana faster if you're feeling drained."

"Most people wouldn't be able to notice him doing that," Felicity noted. "What's your Class, if I might ask?"

"Stormlance," Gareth responded. "It's a fairly rare one, built around the use of a spear as an arcane focus, much as a wizard would use a staff, but much of the power is turned inward rather than outward to enable greater feats of physical prowess. My perception of power, though, is something all soldiers were encouraged to cultivate if possible; sensing an incoming spell could save your life in a battle."

"Yeah," she agreed, "my paladin order had us train a similar awareness, but it's not too common."

Once we'd had some time to rest, we got to our feet and resumed the climb.

"Aren't you going to take the barrier?" Gareth asked.

I shrugged. "Not much point. It works really well as long as it's just sitting there, but the nature of the enchantment is to project the ward through the ground. If it's picked up, it will bleed energy very quickly due to the distance from the ground, and recharging it will be more mana than it would take to repel the spirits more directly."

We made our way further up, slowly approaching the summit. I had to extrude another staircase for us towards the top, but as we were climbing it, Gareth stumbled. I looked over at him and saw the older warrior wide-eyed and pale.

"Are you all right?" I asked, throwing some force waves around to disperse the bane sidhe that were crowding in. They were getting thick up here. "I'd almost say you look like you've seen a ghost, but..." I gestured around us. "Yeah."

He shook his head. "No, perhaps I have. You repelled it too far to check on now, but... by my life, one of those looked like it bore the face of my mother." He took a deep breath to compose himself. "She died peacefully, though; no agony or horror that would turn her into one of these."

Felicity gave his arm a gentle squeeze. "See enough faces and one of them is bound to look familiar."

"Yes, I'm sure that's what it was. Regardless, onward! We're nearly there."

We were close enough to the summit by this point that I could see the "doorway" Gareth had promised. It was a stone arch, maybe ten feet tall or so. When we reached the peak of the mountain and approached it, the arch shimmered slightly, and looking through it we could see something other than the well-lit mountain behind it: a stairway leading down towards a dark plain, nighttime it looked like, with campfires dotting the scene here and there.

Felicity hmmed and looked the archway over. "If I'm right, there should be..." she walked around to the other side of it. "Aha! This is a tower! See this blue crystal here? Touch it." She reached out and did so, followed by Gareth and I. As each of us did so, the crystal chimed softly. "This causes the tower to 'remember' that we have reached this point. Because each floor is its own pocket dimension, they don't necessarily have to connect in their standard order the way they would in a physical dungeon. Instead..." She pressed her hand to the crystal, and the scene through the archway changed, showing the forest. "If we look hard enough we should be able to find a similar crystal hidden somewhere on the tree, to bring us back to this point."

Gareth looked impressed. "That will save me a good deal of time in my explorations of this tower," he said. "Do you wish to return now?"

"I think that's a good idea," I said. "Climbing a mountain is a bit of a wearying ordeal at our Level."

And so we did. Again Gareth walked us back to the highway. "Will you return in another week's time?"

"Probably." And because my conscience was nagging at me, I added, "or maybe less, if things go well. I've been thinking seriously of buying this land, with some of the money from the gems you gave me. Would that bother you?"

"For what purpose?" he asked.

"To build a home. Possibly a fortified one; I'm not certain yet."

He smiled. "That, I would welcome, if it welcomed me."

I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding. I'd been worried that he'd object to it. "Of course," I said. I still didn't particularly trust him on societal matters, but it would be better to keep him close than let him run free Gods-only-know-where.

Once we were in the car and on the way home, Felicity said, "well, that was about the last thing I ever expected."

"The tower?"

"Well, that too, but I meant the books. The mention of a deity unfamiliar to us, but that Gareth knew? I can't help but feel that it's no coincidence he found that tower. There's some connection there."

"The thing that got me, did you catch the numbers on those books? If there's any truth to it, they hint at some calamity that 'blotted out' hundred of millions of kith, maybe more, of all races, together with their families. And we've never heard of it. How could that be? How is an event of that magnitude even possible?"

She nodded. "We saw Deep Dwarvish and Jade Elvish among the scripts there; that implies that it reached the Netherworld, and to other continents. A global event of such universal devastation, that's somehow connected to Gareth, who's somehow connected also to the Gods, who built a Tower in cryptic remembrance of this forgotten event... I think we might be getting in a bit over our heads here."

"Yeah, I'd be the first to agree any normal day. You know I don't really want anything to do with all this stuff. But... these aren't normal days. With all the crazy going on locally and in the Empire overall, who could we talk to about all this without making things worse?"

"I know. Just... think about it?"

"I will." And I did, for about a day. Then Monday happened and drove all thoughts of towers and gods from my mind.