“Upon the Undying?” the scholarly man huffed into his hands before rubbing them together, his nose developing a redness that showed deeply on his pale skin.

She looked back at the engraving in the pillar – an obsidian smoothed stone that showed no signs of erosion – and passed her hand on the text. The letters shimmered under her touch, then returned to their dark, sunken state.

After a day of waiting in the metaphorical shadow of the tower – it was an eternal daylight without the need for sunlight – they were no closer to finding a way into the obsidian spear that stabbed the heavens.

“The Undying,” she repeated as she passed her hand over the characters of the name.

The man had tried to take out a quill and a parchment before, but writing in ink did little in this environment, where a cataract dropped from behind the Tower of Anu – as it was known amongst her people, the scholar called it Catal, some eastern word she did not recognize – making the surroundings damp and hazy.

“The entire text would say something like,” he wiped his spectacles from the gathering droplets and squinted, “Power beckoned. Unsated souls. Voracious spirits. Heed our warning: power sates not, feeds not, provides not. Illusion must be rent, the true path is paved in blood.

Ware the wrath of/upon the Undying”

“What does this mean?” Ash frowned, “that the tower is the cause? That it is the reason we were ‘beckoned’ here?”

“This is a rough translation, so it could mean anyone who came here for power,” the scholar – Abel, she reminded herself, it was a strange name – said in a typical Serahshi accent, thick and nearly lisped, but pronounced well. “A lot of these words are… What's the word? Very old?” he looked at her for confirmation.

“Ancient,” she replied while examining the intricately carved obelisk.

“Yes, ancient, very hard to give precise meaning,” he nodded. “I will write it down, and try to find the… possible meanings,” he said as he nearly fled the entrance of the tower, heading towards the stairs that led to their temporary camp above the damp fog.

She walked around the obelisk, touching every letter that she could before turning to its opposite side’s twin to do the same. The characters looked nearly identical, like a beast's claw marks made into language, but Abel had assured her they were very different from one another.

It was a puzzle, one that she did not know the rules of, one that would open that large round moss-covered gate that loomed between the obelisks. The only thing she knew was that the letters shimmered as her magic reached them.

Ash moved and stood before the gate and blasted it with magic in an act of empty defiance. The gate remained as it was, a monument of failure standing in her path. She clicked her tongue and followed after the scholar.

Ash climbed the stairs while wiping away the coalescing beads on her brow, she was glad they found somewhere above this suffocating humidity. Abel rushed to the fire, extending his hands to warm them. He was a man of a warmer place, not used to the slightest hints of chill. She could not blame him, however, she was starting to feel the cold, as well.

She waved her finger in the air, pulling the moisture out of her own robes and hair. The water beads collected before her before she flung them away. Ash sat on the toppled corpse of the golem, its body covered in rust and dry plant matter, its energy sapped out of it. This corroded construct became her favorite perch to stare at the Anu.

The tower was of a square build, rather than the round towers she was used to seeing, terraced unevenly on every few levels, with the odd over-extended part every few… she would assume floors. It was hard to guess the size of its base from this far, the gigantic waterfalls crashing around it as well as the fog certainly did not help.

The tower was emitting some sort of light, too, something akin to sunlight but with no hint of its warmth from above the clouds.

There was little to tell just by looking at the outside of the great tower. She couldn’t see something that resembled people, on any of the observable levels. There were no creatures roaming around, either. Nothing, no changes. Just a stillborn mass of carved and stacked inky stones. Held together by this magical swirl around it.

Ash could at least feel that last part, she felt how the energy spiraled from the ground towards the top, siphoned from the surroundings, and if she was a lesser mage, from her. It was siphoning so much energy that the flora and fauna in a large radius around the tower were decimated, and it continued to expand, which explained why no one wanted to live, or approach, this region.

Normal people would be dead within a few years of being consumed by this raging magical grindstone of energy, she guessed. This has been going on for nearly seven centuries, According to Abel, at least.

“How long were we here for?” she asked him as she watched the source of the fake light.

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“Two days,” he took off his robes, hanging them to dry. He pondered for a moment before he continued, “it would be the night of the second day now, I think.”

She nodded. It was rather hard to tell time here, but the man was pretty sure of his estimations. Ash would’ve preferred a more accurate measure of things, but there was little else to provide her with such information here, so she begrudgingly accepted the estimations. “We are still no closer to getting into the Anu,” she breathed out as she closed her eyes.

And little to feel in that maelstrom of energies.

“These things require time,” the man insisted, “you want to break through a seal that is eons old, with no other leads or information in a couple of days?” he sounded almost offended at the idea. “We still haven’t figured out what the writing says.”

She looked down at the twin obelisks that surrounded the said seal – the round stone gate. The only thing that they could barely call translated was the bit from before, and the one from yesterday. She could barely remember the details of that one, a story about some king building this tower and then climbing it once it was complete.

“Stupid of us to follow such a vague dream,” she smiled, remembering the vivid vision of the tower destroying the world to fuel a madman’s ambition of godhood. “I’m glad I came here,” the man grabbed a pot and placed it by the flames. “The mysteries, the history, the lost knowledge. The tower called, and provided me with what I wanted.”

Abel had insisted it was the king from the vision, which he had suffered as well, calling it a vision.

She was the first to reach the footfall of this tower and he came soon after. She nearly burned him to death as he stumbled down the hill.

“Do we still have food?” the man took out a moldy pile of once-dried meat out of his bag.

“You are asking if I still have food,” she sighed. They burned through their meager supplies quickly, in these last two days. “There are a couple of sealed rations in the-” the man was halfway inside her bag before she started speaking.

She grumbled, gathered power on the tip of her finger, and set his underpants aflame. Abel yelped and began to pat the ember to extinguish it before deciding to rush towards a puddle.

“Oh,” the rumbling voice nearly made her jump out of her skin. “I did not know this place had people!” she turned to see the source. “People other than me, I mean.”

The gigantic, sparsely-dressed, gray-skinned, four-armed man stared at her and she stared back, making sure to weave a couple of spells at the tips of her fingers, just in case. “You are?”

“I am Sar!” he shouted out, “and I came here on a grand quest that would grant me great strength!”

“You had the dream, too,” she concluded.

“I walked amongst the ancestors and I was told to seek this place,” he continued, not answering her, “it is my fate, my destiny.”

She huffed, looking at Abel who was busy checking the burn in his underpants, unaware that he was now half naked. “We were called here as well,” Ash finally said.

“Ah!” Sar put one of his hands above his eyes to cover them from the fake light and pointed with another towards the distance, while the other pair were crossed. “I see another person!”

“What?” she squinted, eyes following to where he pointed.

“Yes, just standing there, menacingly!” he added with a large excited grin. “And that person is glowing!”

She could not see that other person, not from where she was sitting, but she could’ve sworn she saw something glint in the distance.

“Ah, I hope it is a worthy adversary,” the gray man said with a wistful tone before he turned towards her. “Did you defeat that thing?”

She looked at the rusting golem beneath her and shook her head. “It has been like this for ages, I presume.”

“Hello,” Abel approached Sar, now covered with the burnt pants. “Excuse my… unsightly appearance, I had a slight mishap,” he shot her a look and she wagged her finger threateningly. “I am Abel, man of letters, and you are?”

“I am the great warrior, Sar,” he took the tiny hand in his grip and she could see the flare of pain across Abel's face as he tightened it. “I am here to follow my destiny!”

“What destiny is that that leads you to these desolate lands?” Ash asked, watching Abel struggle to pull his hand and then try to massage the pain away.

“I already told you,” he frowned. “It is a quest for great strength.”

“Strength?” A youthful voice said. It was a girl that couldn’t have been more than sixteen springs of age, covered in tattoos and furs, a wooden mask hanging on the side of her face. Her body was covered in enough animal parts made into accessories or trophies to cover one of her arms up to the neck.

“Another one,” Abel grumbled, “I guess it wasn’t only us after all.”

She simply nodded, watching the girl approaching them, watching them with fascination. “Are you guys here to enter Donjon?” she asked.

Ash assumed this would be the tower’s name in her language.

“You are all here for the tower,” the teen in silver plates – probably the source of the glint earlier – huffed as he climbed the final steps to the hill.

The conversation continued between the new arrivals as Abel approached her. “What do you think?” Abel whispered to her as he patted dirt off his clothes.

“What do I think?” she hummed.

Ash thought they were a dangerous bunch.

That girl did not use magic – she did not have the markings on her soul – yet she exuded a heavy amount of it.

The young knight was different, he devoured magic, somehow. She could see the threads pulling away from the spiral and spinning around him, and then into his armor, instead.

Sar, was of exceptional strength, judging by his muscles alone, who knew what else he was hiding underneath that rough exterior, she might even be surprised with a brain.

She thought that she was exceptionally good at the arcane, spell weaving, and glyphs that few in the entire world could mimic.

That Abel was good at scholarly venues, and little else.

She thought that this darned tower was trying to do something to them, or with them.

Most importantly, she thought that she couldn’t head back, no matter how dangerous this felt.

“Maybe they can help us get inside this darned tower faster,” she finally said.