Artorius descended through the ash-hazed sky, wings straining against the molten wind. Each beat sent knives of pain down his spine, but he kept going, circling the monument that loomed before him like a spike through the world itself.
The tower rose from the dead plain, half buried in volcanic glass, half piercing the red heavens. The structure curved and twisted like a living fang, smooth and seamless, its surface translucent as pale crystal. Beneath that glass-white hide pulsed faint veins of argent light.
The air thickened as he drew near. Every gust shimmered silver, filled with drifting motes that whispered in tongues older than thought. The ground was paved in scale-shaped tiles of fused bone that rang softly under his boots, like distant bells tolling underwater. Each step sent a pulse through the air, as though the tower were aware of his arrival.
When he finally landed at its base, heat rippled off the ground in mirage waves. His wings folded back with a ragged hiss, the membranes smoking faintly. For a long moment he just stood there, staring upward, heart hammering. The spire reached high the top nearly vanished into the low clouds, a seamless column of ivory and crystal that hummed in harmony with the wind.
Runes crawled along its base fluid, shifting, and alive. They glowed faintly, a script of dragons, not carved but grown into the tooth's surface. When he moved, the runes shifted too, watching him, rearranging into new forms he could almost read. His chest tightened. Each breath he drew felt heavier, filled with knowledge that wasn't meant for mortals.
Silver winds coiled around the base like ghosts, their whispers threading through his mind. Words rose out of them fragments of equations, names of stars, the last thoughts of creatures who had outlived time.
Before him yawned an opening, it was vast, dark, perfectly round, the entrance carved in the shape of a dragon's open maw. Rows of petrified fangs framed the archway, gleaming like polished ivory. The air that drifted out carried the smell of cold metal and forgotten paper.
Artorius gripped his lance tighter, jaw set. Then, with wings folded and the whispers pressing close, he stepped into the mouth of the tower.
The darkness swallowed him whole. The air within the place was cool, sterile, and humming. Each breath felt filtered through what felt like disinfectants. His footsteps echoed faintly on a floor so polished it mirrored his shape, distorted by the faint luminescence that bled from the walls.
The walls were the color of moonlight on steel smooth, curved, and alive with a faint pulse, as if some vast creature still slept within the tower's walls. When he brushed his fingers along the surface, he felt vibration not random, but rhythmic, like the thrum of a great heart buried deep below.
Silver glyphs stirred beneath his touch. They slid away like minnows under ice, then reformed elsewhere. Each rune emitted a faint chime, together forming a whispering melody that filled the corridor. He realized, with a start, that the tower was singing.
He continued upward. The passage spiraled, broad at first, then narrowing as he climbed. Every so often, pale light flickered through the walls, refracted by veins of crystal that ran like capillaries through the translucent material.
The Tower seemed endless. And then he caught movement, a gleam at the corner of his eye. He froze, lance lifting instinctively at the ready. At first he thought it was a reflection, a trick of the light. Then the reflection moved. Something peeled itself out of the wall.
A draconic shape sleek, the size of a wolf unfolded from the crystal as if melting from liquid glass. Its body was composed entirely of mirrored scales that caught and split the tower's faint light into rainbows. Eyes like shards of diamond fixed on him.
The System message blinked into existence: [Silver Whelp — Level 7]
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Another one emerged. Then another. All together he counted eight of them sliding down from the walls, wings half-unfurled, tails dragging sparks across the mirrored floor. They made no sound save the crystalline chime of their movement.
Artorius backed up, scanning for angles. The corridor was too tight for flight. The light reflecting from their bodies hurt to look at directly and they stood at every corner cutting off the paths to escape.
The first one lunged. He parried, barely, lance glancing off a body as hard as tempered glass. The shock numbed his wrist. A second struck from the flank, claws carving glowing lines across the air a breath away from racking across his chest. Their speed was unnatural, each movement fluid, synchronized, as though one mind controlled them all.
He ducked another blow and thrust low, striking where the joint met the hooked wing. The lance tip pierced the crystal hide and stuck deep, then to his surprise the creature shattered in a burst of silver dust. No blood. Only shards and light. He did get a message saying he slayed it but that was it.
The others hesitated, flickering like reflections on water. Then they moved again, faster now, light bending around them. He fought against them in silence, panting, lance arcs catching the faint light as the hallway filled with glimmers of shattered guardians. Even though they did outnumber him and outlevel him, he had been through many fights so far and he assumed he had the advantage of his class and archetype which they most likely didn't have.
When the last fell, the air rang like struck glass, the fragments melting into the floor until nothing remained. The tower grew still again, its song resuming quieter, now, almost approving. Artorius stood in the glow, his reflection warped in the mirrored floor. He had a good look at himself after what felt like eons and he looked less like a man now and more like the denizens of this hellhole: a dragon walking upright.
Still he thankfully got a level from all the killing as he got a message: Congratulations! You have leveled up. Race: [True-Blood DragonMen] → Lv. 6
He wiped the blood from his chin and climbed higher.
The stairs wound upward for what felt like hours, the glow in the walls brightened to a steady, argent radiance that painted the curve of the tower like moonlight on water. Then the stairway opened.
He stepped into a cavernous chamber vast enough to contain a mansion, its walls concave, its roof lost in shadow. The floor beneath his boots was a perfect circle of translucent glass, beneath which slow rivers of light pulsed like veins.
And above him floated books in the air. Thousands of crystalline tablets drifted weightless in the air, each one inscribed with delicate runes that glowed and dimmed like breathing stars. The room hummed not with air, but with knowledge. Lines of energy arced lazily from tablet to tablet, forming constellations that shifted and rearranged in patterns too complex to follow. The entire chamber was alive with memory.
Artorius stared in awe. Thoughts that weren't his filled his mind with impressions of time before time: wings spanning islands, fires that forged worlds, the music of dragonkind echoing through the void. His knees nearly buckled beneath the weight of it. Every heartbeat brought new whispers, new knowledge, burning through his skull like a fever.
He won't deny it, he was curious, he wanted to know more but as the saying goes curiosity killed the cat. The temptation to reach out towards one of the tablets and learn more was unbearable and he did just that.
The moment his fingers brushed a tablet, the runes flared white-hot. Light surged up his arm, searing through flesh into bone. Visions flooded him, a storm of wings, a sea of stars, a blinding lattice of equations describing the birth of fire. He tore his hand away with a ragged scream, skin smoking. The tablet floated placidly back into its orbit, as if nothing had happened.
If that had been all he might have been able to walk away, but the Tower didn't welcome thieves. A rumble shivered through the chamber. The floating tablets drifted aside, parting like curtains. From behind them, something moved. Shapes unfurled from the far walls, long, serpentine bodies shimmering with facets of translucent blue and silver. They moved with lazy grace, light refracting off their hides in prismatic ripples, alive with magic and purpose.
A System message flickered before him: [Crystal Drake — Level 9]
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Counting them off as they slid or jumped down from the book shelves, they numbered five in total. Their bodies slid silently around him, eyes like molten glass. Artorius braced, his lance heavy in his hands. His pulse thundered in his ears.
The first attack was a beam of refracted light, a focused lance of energy that split the floor beside him, fusing glass into molten puddles. He dove aside, the air crackling where the blast passed. Another beam followed from the opposite side, perfectly timed.
He rolled, shards slicing his palms. He noticed they were using the tablets to focus their spells which was smart too smart for all these creatures he ran into so far. The light bounced and bent between them, refracting like mirrors until it converged in lethal spears.
He ran, dodging the beans though some did strike him as one tore through his shoulder and another his back. Bearing through the excruciating pain which at this point had become a constant companion with him, the floor shook behind him as a drake's tail smashed down where he had been, scattering crystal tablets into spiraling orbits.
He ducked beneath a sweeping claw, thrust upward, his lance grazing along its neck barely a scratch. Its scales were harder than diamond, but when he pulled back, he saw thin fractures spiderwebbing outward. He grinned through bloodied teeth. Everything breaks.
Still slowly chipping away at them would be time consuming and he would most likely be finished off before then, staring closely at the beans bouncing against the tablets a thought entered his mind.
Grabbing his lance, he chucked it at the nearest drake, it flew straight in the air and caught one of them in the flank. The drakes turned toward it instinctively for one moment giving him the opening he needed in that instant, he snatched a shattered tablet from the floor and slammed it against a beam heading his way. The fragments caught the magic and sent it careening towards one of the drakes.
It seemed as if the creatures never expected one of their attacks to come back towards them as it just stood there for too long as the beam struck right into its face. That one was done for the count as he even got a prompt from the system, but he ignored it as he focused on the one that shot a bean right at him forgoing the tablets they used to bounce it around.
With the crystal tablet still in hand, he only held it up as it hurled the attack right back to it, ending it for good.
Looking at his remaining foes, he had only 3 left in which one was uselessly pawling at his lance to try to remove it. The drakes realized that their tactic was not working and looked as if they gave up on shooting beans at him, but Astorius wasn't having it as he used his Command.
"Shoot," he called out and the creatures were left with no choice as the ability took effect.
The air exploded into chaos, light scattering in every direction, beams ricocheting from surface to surface. The drakes shrieked, their own spells turned against them, flaying their wings into shards.
Artorius threw himself behind a pillar of crystal as the chamber filled with searing radiance. Maybe he shouldn't had them fire all at once. When it faded, the air was thick with settling dust and the smell of ozone. He pushed himself up, coughing.
Congratulations! You have leveled up. Archetype: [Leader] → Lv. 6
Stat gains: +1 INT, +1 WIL, +1 CHA
Around him lay the shattered remnants of the drakes' splintered wings, glowing fragments, pools of liquid light. The floating tablets had stilled again, their runes dimmed, as though the library itself mourned its keepers.
He looked up. At the far end of the chamber, a staircase rose into a narrow shaft of light that reached for the heavens. The pulse of magic above was stronger now steady, alive, aware.
The Tower was leading him higher. Artorius picked up his lance from the dead drake, still glowing faintly with refracted light, and began the ascent.
-
The stairway tightened into a needle-thin corridor before blooming outward into a chamber so vast Artorius first mistook it for the sky. Then he realized the ceiling wasn't the heavens at all but arched high above him, a dome of pure glass shot through with veins of glowing silver pulsing like circulation in a living, dreaming thing.
The floor was a mosaic of shattered reflections crystal plates fractured long ago and fused together into a mirrored landscape. Every step scattered his reflection a hundredfold. His breath fogged faintly in the shimmering cold.
What lay beneath stole the breath from his lungs. This was no simple room. This was an amphitheater layered in perfect concentric rings descending toward a central pit in which he walked into. But instead of stone seats or carved pews, each tier was lined with hundreds of crystal pods. Perfect ovals, translucent and glittering like eggs carved from moonlight.
And inside each one where dragons frozen still. He wasn't sure if they were all dead or asleep. They were trapped inside their translucent prisons like insects in amber. Some were curled into fetal shapes, wings folded tightly around lean bodies. Others were twisted mid-roar, jaws stretched open in silence. A few had claws pressed eternally against the inner surface of their pods, as if they'd tried desperately to escape before time seized them.
His feet carried him forward without thought, boots crunching softly over the fractured mirror-floor. Artorius approached the nearest pod. Inside lay a drake the size of a tiger, its scales shimmering beneath the crystal like stars beneath water. He swallowed hard. This was a prison, a vault, a graveyard for the living.
The silver veins in the dome flickered, as though reacting to his presence. Something here was watching him. He noticed his reflection on the floor twisted, elongated coiling behind him like a serpentine shadow. He spun around with lance raised and saw nothing. Only row after row of crystal pods, gleaming like a silent audience.
Then he noticing some large glop of water dripping down, looking up he saw a long serpentine creature with scales like interlocking shards of glass polished to a mirror shine had its moth wide open ready to swallow him.
A System prompt flared: [Crystalline Basilisk — Level 11]
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It was only thanks to check thinking that Artorius jumped back, wings flaring instinctively wide ready to take flight as the creature came crashing in where he was. But it was the eyes that froze him. Twin orbs of absolute clarity, perfect white crystal with pupils like razor-thin fractures. He could not meet its gaze.
The creature hissed, and the sound wasn't a hiss at all, but the shattering of frozen glass annoyed its prey got away. The basilisk lunged again and Artorius dove aside, sliding across the mirrored floor as those crystal jaws slammed shut where he'd been standing. The impact was like a hammer striking stone. Shards exploded outward.
He didn't dare look up. He kept his gaze fixed on the creature's reflection scattered across the floor. The basilisk hissed and a sharp sound of cracks spreading across the floor behind him. He glanced back just long enough to see the mirrored tiles crystallizing, turning solid white as frost raced toward his legs.
He leapt into the air as the crystals snapped closed around empty air. He dived down with a heroic blow striking right in the spine. The creature screamed in pain as he backed away. He dropped to the floor throwing himself into a slide and slid open its belly wide open.
The basilisk convulsed, its entire body pulsing with cracked light but it refused to die. The basilisk reared up its eyes burning like polished stars. It was going to force him to look and he wasn't going to have that.
Letting his lance elongate he poked its eyes out making it thrash wildly, tail and body smashing pillars, destroying the chamber in a frenzy of pain and rage. Flying up he aimed at the last eye and for one single second he felt their gaze connect before he could close his eyes.
Dropping like a stone, he could feel his body slowly crystallizing as he was most likely going to turn into a statue but he felt his lance connected with something. He forced the weapon deeper, pouring every ounce of strength into the strike. The basilisk let out one last scream, a sound that echoed through the chamber and reverberated through his bones.
Then it collapsed. Shard by shard. Until only a massive heap of crystal fragments remained—glowing faintly, then slowly dimming.
Artorius opened his eyes and was greeted to;
Congratulations! You have leveled up.Class: [Storybook Squire] → Lv. 6
-
Artorius pushed open the door to the next chamber up and stepped into a cavern of blinding brilliance. The smell hit him first—hot metal mixed with a strange, sterile tang, like scorched sand. This place was a forge.
The room stretched wide, a circular arena of polished pale stone broken by massive veins of glass that pulsed beneath the surface like lava trapped in crystal. Above, suspended on chains thick as tree trunks, hung a crucible, a sphere of metal glowing with inner fire. It turned slowly, heavy and old, shedding sparks of silver that drifted down like falling stars.
Ramps and walkways spiraled around the Forge. He tightened his grip on his lance. He could feel it something waited here. Then, as if answering to a silent call, two massive shapes pushed themselves free from the walls.
At first, Artorius mistook them for statues but they stepped forward. Twin silhouettes, each towering ten feet tall. Each carved from fused crystals, their bodies sculpted in jagged, geometric slabs shaped with precision. Their shoulders were broad pillars. Their chests were ridged stone lattices. Their limbs were long point crystals that pulsed with faint light.
Where a face might have been, each had only a single vertical slit, glowing faintly like a furnace seen through a crack in a kiln. The System chimed. [Silica Golem — Level 12]
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Artorius exhaled slowly. "Oh… wonderful."
The twins stepped forward in perfect synchrony, the sound of their movement like grinding millstones. The floor shuddered as they advanced. They didn't roar. They didn't threaten. They simply moved to kill.
The left golem lunged first, shockingly fast for something so large. Its arm swung down in a hammer blow that cracked the stone floor into a spiderweb of fractures. Artorius dove aside, the shockwave tossing him like a ragdoll.
Before he could rise, the second golem was already there. It stomped, and the ground itself buckled downward, forming a crater. He rolled into the depression, grit biting into his palms. They were coordinated, not mindless brutes, but perfect mirrored machines.
The first golem bent low, both arms sweeping forward in a crushing embrace. He leapt out just as the arms clapped together, the resulting thunderclap rattling his teeth. He landed behind them, boots skidding on the glass floor. They turned toward him in unison with two slits glowing.
The heat in the room intensified. "Oh, that's not good." Twin pillars of sand erupted from their palms like flamethrowers aimed right at him. Artorius launched himself skyward, wings flaring. The streams of sand slammed into each other beneath him, fusing into a widening pool of glowing glass that hissed and cracked as it cooled.
The two creatures looked up as he dove at them. He swept low over the second golem's shoulder, lance scraping along its silica plating. The tip left only a shallow groove. Not enough. The golem responded instantly: its arm swung in a wide backhand, faster than he expected. The blow caught Artorius mid-air and sent him smashing through a half-melted railing.
Pain burst across his ribs. His vision flickered. He rolled, coughing blood, and barely avoided the heavy stomp that cratered the ground where he'd been. The twins approached from opposite sides, forming a tightening circle.
Their slits glowed brighter. Pale light surged through the veins in their limbs. They were charging something and Artorius took advantage of it. Letting his lance elongate and fly though the air it strike one of them right in the face blocking its attack it was building up.
It had the effect he was looking for as its face exploded. The other attack he was able to only dodge with the skin of his teeth though some of it grazed him, leaving burnt flesh. Still Artorius did not stop as he sprinted directly at the last one, pickling up his lance on the way.
The golems readied itself but it did not expect his command that latched it in place, "STOP!" He charged up a heroic blow and struck it also in the opened slit. Golden energy flared down the weapon. The Heroic Blow detonated inside the golem's skull. Its face-slit burst outward in a geyser of molten silica.
The giant machine staggered back and fell onto the ground headless.
Congratulations! You have leveled up. Race: [True-Blood DragonMen] → Lv. 7
Stat gains: +1 STR, +1 DEX, +1 CON, +1 PER, +1 CHA
Congratulations! You have leveled up. Archetype: [Leader] → Lv. 7
Stat gains: +1 INT, +1 WIL, +1 CHA
-
The climb up the last few steps twisted into silence. The stairs here were no longer smooth, but carved spiraling through ribs of translucent bone. The light dimmed the higher he climbed, until it became a thin silver thread flickering through the glass like a dying heartbeat. Every step he took rang faintly, echoing up the hollow spine of the tower.
Then the air changed. It wasn't heat. It wasn't cold. It was pressure. Like invisible hands closing around his skull. Thoughts that weren't his began to whisper half formed, half remembered voices echoing in his mind in tones eerily familiar.
"You shouldn't have come here."
He froze, heart pounding as he asked himself if that was English. The stairway opened into a wide, circular chamber. The walls here were darker smooth, silver glass polished to a mirror finish. A shallow pool lay at the center, the surface flat as a mirror, glowing faintly from within. Symbols spiraled outward from it, not carved but burned into the floor, each one flickering with soft mental resonance.
The moment he stepped in, his reflection rippled. And then the reflection smiled back.
Something stirred beneath the surface. The pool quivered, then exploded outward in a burst of argent fluid. From its depths rose three serpentine forms, sleek and elegant, their bodies composed of liquid silver threaded with veins of light. Their eyes were pure crystal cold, emotionless, yet all-seeing.
[Psychic Wyvern — Level 14]
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Their bodies hovered just above the pool, the air rippling with psionic force. Their presence pressed against his skull thoughts like hooks dragging through his memories.
Show us your fear.
Show us your hunger.
Show us what you truly are.
Artorius staggered as images flashed through his mind. The Luck Dragon, its kind eyes dimming. The hatchlings he'd slain in the fields. The wurms tearing each other apart in the Bone Gardens. Every drop of blood he'd spilled replayed in perfect clarity.
He fell to one knee, gasping, lance clattering beside him. These things were mentally messing with his mind as he was experiencing the mother of all headaches. Blood dripped down from his nose, his eyes, his eyes… everywhere as they mentally assaulted him.
Then he heard himself, his own voice, mocking him. "Monster."
The serpent-like creatures moved as one closing in on him slowly, enjoying his suffering and upping the ante. Pain exploded behind his eyes. The world fractured into shards of color, the floor bending, twisting, warping. He felt himself pulled apart past, present, future every version of him screaming. His blood boiled. His thoughts bled away until he felt nothing.
He roared. It wasn't defiance. It was instinct. His inner self or was that his class, he wasn't sure, flared to life, golden fire burning through his veins. The psychic pressure faltered for a single moment and that was all he needed as he commanded. "STOP!"
The creatures who had at first reared back, hissing silently now froze in place. This time Artorius' command seemed to be all encompassing as the creatures could barely move as he snatched up his lance and drove forward. The first strike pierced one creature clean through, its body bursting into a fountain of molten mercury. But even as it fell, its voice echoed in his mind, "You cannot kill thought."
His killing blow seemed to break the creatures out of his command as the second one struck, coiled around him, fangs sinking into his shoulder. It didn't tear flesh, it drained memory. Faces, names, the warmth of the sun gone. Rage took their place. He spun, wings flaring wide, the wind shattering the silver mirror beneath them. The reflection fractured into a thousand pieces, each one showing a different version of himself: man, dragon, corpse, king, god.
He struck, breaking through the haze of memories as his lance blazed with Heroic Blow, the light golden and pure against the silver gloom. It punched through the creature's head, the psychic connection snapping with a deafening mental scream.
Two down. One to go.
The last hovered high above the pool, the largest, its scales glowing like moons. It stared down with perfect stillness, then spoke directly into his mind not with malice, but with pity. "You are a broken thing pretending to be whole."
The chamber darkened. The walls turned translucent, showing vistas of stars and dragons drifting through memory. The serpent's mind expanded, filling everything. He felt it prying through his memories, searching for something, but he was done playing these games.
Artorius snarled, dragging up everything left in him: pain, fury, pride, blood. The flame inside roared again. His will hardened. "Get… out."
The psychic storm collapsed inward as his aura exploded outward, golden flames meeting silver misty thought. The creature recoiled, its body flickering like liquid flame. He leapt, wings propelling him through the air, lance raised high. He drove it down through the creature's skull, straight into the glowing pool below. The explosion was silent, made of light and thought rather than sound.
When it cleared, the pool was gone and evaporated into mist. The mirrored walls were cracked, the runes burnt out. Shards of silver drifted down like ash. Artorius fell to one knee, panting. His nose bled. His head throbbed like it was splitting in two. But the voices were gone.
Killing them also seemed to have netted him some positives as he got: Congratulations! You have leveled up.Class: [Storybook Squire] → Lv. 7
Stat gains: +1 STR, +1 CON, +1 DEX, +1 CHA, +1 LUC!
Congratulations! You have leveled up. Race: [True-Blood DragonMen] → Lv. 8
All that remained was a whisper, faint but approving, echoing from the walls themselves. "Come," he heard a call. He simply stood, breathing the cold, silent air, and turned toward the final stairway where the light of the summit waited, and something greater than all the others was calling his name.
-
Chapter 7 Recap!
Leveled up Race: True-Blood DragonMen to Lvl. 6!
Leveled up Race: True-Blood DragonMen to Lvl. 7!
+1 Str, +1 Con, +1 Dex, +1 Per, +1 Char!
Leveled up Race: True-Blood DragonMen to Lvl. 8!
Leveled up Leader Archetype to Lvl. 6!
+1 Int, +1 Will, +1 Char!
Leveled up Leader Archetype to Lvl. 7!
+1 Int, +1 Will, +1 Char!
Leveled up Class: Storybook Squire to Lvl. 6!
Leveled up Class: Storybook Squire to Lvl. 7!
+1 Str, +1 Con, +1 Wil, +1 Char, +1 Luc!