[https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/995431514080813086/1047416420566306846/sun-kiss_fantasy_dark_energy_red_purple_blue_white_wallpaper_sm_1e8bfe35-cf71-4296-87d9-4d2d3deb365a.png]
Chapter 28: Test
----------------------------------------
“I may be your offspring, but I am not your son.”
----------------------------------------
“Name?” the attendant asked, pen hovering over the blank stone pedestal. Her voice sounded tired, as if she’d been working for hours, though Arwen knew the Tower only opened its doors to applicants at dawn, which was just a short while ago.
She didn’t look up at Arwen, didn’t even acknowledge her, save for the question.
“Arwen, Arw—”
“Save it. Age, race, nationality?”
Arwen bit her tongue. Her face grew hot at the blatant disregard, and she felt ashamed of herself. She was dressed in tattered rags that bore more skin than anything her mother would’ve let her wear; her hair was a mess, she weighed less than an underfed dog, and she hadn’t seen a bath let alone a wash bucket in weeks; she had faced near death by starvation, eaten dirt to temper her hunger, and stabbed a boy to death, yet being treated like qortle to be tagged and shepherded by this woman embarrassed her more than anything she’d faced so far. Arwen felt the embers of rage start to heat in her breast, and she chewed the inside of her cheek, urging the pain to distract her from the emotion. She couldn’t afford to be turned away.
“Twenty, human, Gillatarian.” Nothing more than what she asks for.
The bespectacled woman glanced up, squinted at Arwen’s face, looked her up and down, eyes not pausing before returning to look back into Arwen’s. They shone with suspicion and irritation.
“Do you have identification?”
Arwen dropped her eyes, unable to hold the contact as her face flushed brighter; she doubted the blush would be distinguishable from her sunburn, but to be treated like an animal by this woman was more than she could bare. She should have been used to it by now, but since the man in the black cloak had given her life and a new purpose, a sense of rebellion had taken root inside of her.
“No.” She bit the word off.
The woman shook her head as if she’d been expecting it and wrote on the pedestal. The pen was a short, carved rod of what looked like ivory, and the pedestal a raised stone platform with a flat, square top. Lines appeared in blue light where the pen touched, then faded soon afterwards.
Arwen watched the strange technology but said nothing. The tower didn’t follow the same rules as the rest of the world, that was common knowledge, but seeing it in person was still a surreal experience. Arwen watched in annoyance as the attendant wrote “Arwen, 20, Human,” then “N/A” where her nationality was meant to go. She followed those with “Tiris (INP),” then put the pen in its holder, a small cube with a slot etched out, at the corner of the table.
“You’re group G, number seven-hundred fifty-six,” she said, reaching behind her and taking a rectangular tab of wood from a slot in the wall. It was engraved with the Gillatarian seal, and her information set in neat lines underneath.
Taking the tab, Arwen walked to the side door held open by the attendant, then entered the room. The attendant removed a knife from her belt and held it out towards Arwen.
“Your hand.”
Hesitantly, Arwen presented her hand, palm up, and without a moment’s hesitation or warning, the woman sliced its center. Arwen winced, but the pain was miniscule compared to what she’d been through in the past few years, and she didn’t cry out.
“Drop some on the key,” the woman said, as if she were having to explain the most primitive of common knowledge. If Arwen survived, she’d find this woman. She studied the woman’s face: her suspicious green eyes, petulant mouth, and too-large nose. Arwen decided that she hated her.
She lifted her hand over the wooden tablet and dripped blood onto its surface. The blood sunk into the wood, and the lettering began to glow a bright red. As if in response to the key’s glowing, her right wrist began to burn. Lines rose from her skin, and a brand in the shape of a tower with a G above, the number 7 to its left, 5 to its right, and 6 beneath it took shape.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“This is your key mark,” the woman said, snatching her burning, branded wrist and holding it up to Arwen’s face. “If you pass the testing floor, then you’ll use it in place of the wooden key to access the Tower’s amenities. If the original wooden key is destroyed before you reach the first floor of the tower, you will die. If you move beyond fifty meters of your key at any time before reaching the first floor, you will die. If you leave the tower’s premises before the expiration of thirty days, you will die. Once you pass through the gate to the first floor, your wooden key will become inert, and its rei transferred fully to your brand.” As she spoke, the woman dragged her towards a door in the back of the reception room.
It looked like the rest of the Tower’s wall with no doorknob to speak of, only discernable as a passageway because of the arching line cut in the stone that made a symmetrical upside-down U. Arwen struggled to make sense of the information, but the woman wasn’t slowing down, towing Arwen behind her as she strode to the strange doorway.
She stopped, released Arwen’s wrist, and said, “tap your key to the door.”
Nursing her wrist and scowling at the attendant, Arwen pressed the edge of the engraved wooden rectangle against the stone. The arch slid into the floor with a soft grating sound like sandpaper on wood. She turned to look at the attendant, her face angry, but confused. What did she mean, “testing floor?” And the key killing her? She’d never heard of any of this, and she’d spent her entire life in the city.
She opened her mouth to speak, but was cut off by the attendant, green eyes staring back at her, uncaring, as pushed her glasses up with her pointer finger, then placed her hand on Arwen’s shoulder.
“Welcome to the Tower,” she said, then pushed her in.
----------------------------------------
Arwen’s ears buzzed, and her vision swam as she blinked repeatedly. Blue. Why could she only see blue? Her head was cloudy, her breathing slow and deep, and her body felt hot; memories of heat exhaustion flashed in her mind, and she thought she might puke. She tried turning her head to look around, only to realize that she was lying flat on her face. Odd. She couldn’t feel… anything. She got her arms underneath her. It wasn’t that she couldn’t feel anything, she realized, but that her sense of touch was significantly hindered somehow. She could sense her arms, legs, and yes, even her face now, but it was all distant, like her body had fallen asleep and was having difficulty waking up.
She pushed up, getting to her knees then rolling over to sit on her butt; standing up was not a good idea right now. She pressed her hands to her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut before opening them and finally looking about her. Soon, the reason that she’d at first only seen the color blue was revealed. The floor was a perfectly flat, somewhat glossy, and reflective blue… something. It wasn’t stone, and it wasn’t quite as translucent as glass. She expected it to be cold, but instead the floor beneath her bare feet and under her thin shift was surprisingly warm. The Tower’s crystal, then? She was unsure.
Taking her hand from her forehead, Arwen felt around on the floor. Her hand hit something, and it went skittering across the floor; It was the wooden tab, her key, lying face up on the ground, now spinning in place a few feet away from her. Her heart skipped a beat remembering the attendant’s warnings, and she scrambled over to it, scooped it up, tucked it into the space between her chest and her shift.
Heart racing, she observed the perplexing flatness about her. It extended outwards endlessly; there were no walls, no ceiling, no sky. Above was an empty black void, which led her to question how she was able to see at all, but light seemed to simply exist in the space with no obvious source. Looking about her, she realized that she didn’t even cast a shadow. Something in the corner of her vision caught her eye, and she snapped her head towards it, anxiety rising in her breast.
Twenty or so meters away, a man was getting to his feet. With horror, she recognized him as the barbaric brute that’d cut her in line earlier; he had a hand pressed to his head, but she knew from experience that the disorientation didn’t last long, and she didn’t want to be anywhere near him and the two axes at his hips when he got a grip on himself. She started scooting backwards, turning, and scrambling to her feet.
As she started in a light jog, her head began to clear, and her body equalized, gradually returning to its normal senses. Keeping her head on a swivel as she ran, Arwen noticed more and more people in the emptiness around her in varying states of dress, armament, and wakefulness. Some still lay unconscious on the translucent blue flatness, others were standing and looking about, their faces and postures scared, on edge, and defensive. I don’t like this at all. I need a weapon.
Realizing there wasn’t anywhere to run to and sufficiently distanced from the muscled giant, she stopped and caught her breath. Even the extremely conservative pace of her jog was enough to leave her chest heaving, lungs burning, and calves screaming bloody murder. The cloaked man’s rations had done something miraculous in reversing most of the effects of her starvation, but they had still left her a husk of a person: skin clung to strings of muscle clung to bone. With a start, however, she did notice that her arms and legs looked a bit fuller than they had yesterday… perhaps the man’s magical food had longer lasting effects than she’d realized.
She’d ran to the center of a large, dispersed group, getting as far away from any one individual as she could manage. Underweight, unarmed, and without any friends or means of protecting herself, she did her best to appear inconspicuous. She could hear sobbing from somewhere to her right, though the person crying was blocked from her vision by more bodies. The sound lifted to the empty void above, drifting into the vast nothingness. There was no echo, she noted; it truly seemed as if they were outside. Her mind couldn’t comprehend the alien setting, so she tried to ignore it and focus on what she could control.
The people around her were her immediate concern. The tower existed, as far as she knew, for entertainment, and the nature of that entertainment was violence. She had no false notions of safety; the laws that governed the city state of Gillataria were already lax, taking after the nation’s predilection towards conflict, and within this strange place, there was no one to turn to for help. She recognized several of the others, men, women, and even children that had been with her in the intake plaza. There were those with the familiar tan skin and blonde hair of Gillataria and the surrounding countries, and those with complexions and features of all the major notable kingdoms.
Upon closer inspection, nearly every nationality that she was familiar with was represented here, along with many she was not. She recognized the pale skin and tall statures of a few Nurish, meaning the brute hadn’t been the only one; there was a woman, shorter, stockier, her skin a light hue of red and her dark brown hair hanging in dreads from her thick head, a resident of Kynia. All these were familiar to her, and she picked out foreigners from each major nation as well as those whose identities she couldn’t place. More disturbingly, she saw several off-worlders; the foreigners alone were supposed to be taken in at the main entrance, and travelers from the Seven Divine Sovereignties were always treated with the utmost courtesy in Gillataria; how had they ended up here? If they had come to participate in the tournaments, then surely, they’d be subject to different protocols than the likes of her. What’s going on?
A shrill voice cut through her reverie, its proclamation causing her to freeze in place.
“WELCOME TO ZERO FLOOR! Also known as the Test Floor. I am Tobi, the test administrator. Thank you for relinquishing your soul to the Venerable Goddess Sakyubi; the first test will begin momentarily.”