I advance through the tower as if each step were a confession tearing me from within.The floor creaks beneath my feet, but it is neither wood nor stone: it is woven from memories torn from others. Each forgotten cry of existence embeds itself under my feet, and I feel the weight of those lives slowly crushing me.
I turn a corridor and a figure appears. Not the Tower, not an echo of her. It is him: the Man with the Harmonica.His silhouette bends like a shattered mirror, and his eyes hold the infinite expanse of this impossible architecture. He says nothing at first; his presence alone tells me there is no turning back.
"Every grain of this structure holds a sigh, a memory, a fragment of horror that once was life," he says, and his words resonate in my mind though no sound exists."This is not hell you have seen… it is the Tower. An extension of that which watches the void. No pain goes unrecorded; no death leaves no trace."
I understand, with a terror that pierces me, that what I called "infernal" is merely the language of the void, a geometry translating existence into agony and echoes.Every form, every crystal, every bone tells the story of what was and what could never be.
I am drawn to a side chamber. There, on a pedestal, lies a journal. Its pages unfold like an incomplete celestial map: names, dates, coordinates twisting in space as if the Tower interprets them.He watches me."It is not only your world bleeding here. All touched by the Tower now form its architecture. And you… are the next brick if you do not understand how to hold your anchor."
Then I feel her.My daughter.Not alive, not dead, but a tortuous thread between worlds.Her gaze pierces me from memory, from the act that condemned me: she killed me in a moment of madness, and yet… her presence anchors me to the sanity I still possess.A perverse warmth tells me: resist, continue, even if what you love has shattered you.
As I struggle to hold my mind, the Tower groans.As if it knows I am aware, that I understand.A shiver runs through the corridors: the rift has begun.
The Man with the Harmonica leans and whispers something impossible to remember, and I realize the true horror is not falling… but being conscious while the fall occurs.