As the blinding brilliance of teleportation faded, their sight gradually adjusted to the new scenery that awaited them.
They had arrived on the second layer of the tower.
Unlike the radiant hall of puzzles they had just left behind, this chamber was a place of shadows.
A few pale shafts of light filtered down from unseen cracks high above, their glow catching the ever-drifting motes of dust.
For ordinary mortals, such a place would have been suffocating, its blurred outlines and muted colors drowning sight in uncertainty.
But for Ascendants, darkness was little more than a veil, thin, deceptive, incapable of hiding what truly lurked within.
At the heart of this vast chamber loomed a colossal stone pillar, so massive it seemed to hold the sky itself upon its shoulders.
It stretched upward endlessly, vanishing into shadow where no eye could follow. The faint sound of stone groaning echoed from above, as if the tower itself was breathing.
