Book 3, Chapter 68 (Patreon)

If I’d let only gravity take me, it would have taken me close to half an hour just to reach ground level after jumping off the top of the Sanctum of Light. Speeding it up with a flight spell got me there in about half the time, but I still had a long, long way to go. The true size of the tower defied comprehension, even just the portion that was visible.  It was one of those things that a person could know, rationally, could see the numbers and claim they understood, but never truly grasp until they saw it for themselves.

The tower utterly dwarfed any single mountain I’d ever seen. They were mere bumps, infants crawling around a giant’s feet. As close to it as I was, it didn’t even seem like a tower, just an endless silvery gray wall that expanded in every direction, the edge of the world itself. Even angling my descent to put a few miles between myself and the tower did little to dispel that illusion.

Once I reached the puckered scar of land that formed the chasm surrounding the tower, it got simultaneously better and worse. The darkness ruined the sense of scale, but at the same time, with nothing to compare it to, it became the sole marker of my progress. Without the tower wall blurring by as I fell, I would have nothing but the howling wind to tell me that I was even moving.

One hour turned into two and still I dropped into the darkness. The temperature started to rise, and the mana became so dense that I grew concerned that even my new stage five core wouldn’t be strong enough to push back on it. I used my travel time to replenish my own lost reserves, not that a few hours would be enough.

Heavy mana wasn’t quite the same as regular mana, and this far down, that was all there was. It was a smothering blanket to my senses, an insulator that made it harder to cast spells outside my own body. It was poison to my mana core if it worked its way in without me breaking it down into something usable. In my previous life, I would have been fascinated to find such a large source of it to work with, since there were also a variety of magical effects that could only be produced with heavy mana.

Now, it just served as another clue about what had happened to the world. If Ammun had harnessed heavy mana for his super weapon, it wasn’t so surprising that it had done enough damage to break the world core. It also pointed toward him tapping directly into the world core itself, which was composed of exclusively heavy mana.

Prior to the cataclysm that had destroyed whole civilizations and reduced much of the planet to a desert wasteland, mana was generated by the world core, something millions of times bigger than even the largest dragon’s core, and it radiated outward, rising up to permeate the ground. Natural deposits of crystallized mana could be found by those who dug deep enough for it. All sorts of lichens, mosses, and fungi grew in abundance in huge underground caverns.

Mana broke down the farther it rose until it reached the surface, where it became what we considered ‘normal’ mana, used in abundance by plants and suffusing every rock and stream. The world core was what people meant by the planet being alive. Without it, we were left with a dead lump of rock and what little mana we could generate ourselves.

The longer I fell, the more convinced I became that Ammun’s tower hadn’t been built to be a super weapon. It was the work of decades at minimum, hundreds of millions of tons of rock transmuted and shaped into the tower, tens of thousands of man hours of ward-laying to make it indestructible – a necessary trait just to keep it from collapsing under its own weight. Whatever he’d been originally planning, adapting it to be a moon breaker had come later.

Had he been trying to build a direct conduit to the world core with the intent of flooding his entire country with mana? Theoretically, it could work, and it would explain why the tower rose so many miles above ground level. It needed the time it spent falling to break apart, otherwise the entire country would have been beaten down by heavy mana.

But why would he devote so many years of labor to this project in the first place? What had been the point of flooding an area with mana? History books were, unsurprisingly, not all that helpful. People rarely knew much about what had happened even a few hundred years ago, let alone a few thousand. The tower itself was probably the most likely place in the entire world to have accurate records since it appeared to be one of the only civilizations that wasn’t actively struggling to survive.

At the same time, the tower was also the most likely place in the world to have rewritten history to fit its modern propaganda. It was difficult to trust anything its books said to be objective fact since the aristocracy in charge had every reason to lie to ensure the continuation of their own power.

Finally, around hour three of magic-enhanced freefall, something changed. I had to cut short the accumulation of mana into my reserves when I sensed a shift in the mana around me. I had an instant’s warning before a serpent-shaped mana wraith reached the edge of my range. It was huge, easily big enough to swallow me whole, and angled to intercept me as I fell. Hundreds of feet of its length coiled around it as it dove at me, but that warning was all I needed.

A phantasmal shell coalesced around me, and when the serpent swallowed me whole, it shredded itself from the inside out. A moment later, I was free and still falling, while it wound its way drunkenly back off into the dark abyss I was passing through, bleeding mana and no longer interested in me, an odd behavior for this type of monster.

That was a big mana fiend, possibly the biggest I’d ever seen, so I was happy to let it flee. I relaxed my phantasmal shell after it left the range I could sense mana at, but I had concerns about the concentration of mana wraiths growing denser. Even with my latest upgrade, I couldn’t maintain an indefinite phantasmal shell. If things got too much worse, I’d have to reconsider my descent to the base of the tower.

As it was, I was running into another problem. The tower kept getting wider, but the chasm it was standing in didn’t. The empty space between the walls was rapidly shrinking to the point of only being a mile wide now instead of fifteen. At the rate it was going, in another ten or fifteen minutes, there’d be no room left.

Hopefully that meant I was close to the base and not that there were hundreds more miles of tower buried in solid rock. After spending so many hours in an enhanced freefall, if I reached the bottom of the chasm and there was nothing there, I was liable to start blowing things up.

Fortunately, the serpent mana wraith seemed to be a one-off. A few smaller ones showed up here and there, but not in any sort of number, and I was easily able to destroy them on approach with a few mana puncture spells. The mana kept getting heavier, so much so that I was starting to suspect it was too thick for mana wraiths to form in, and that the few I saw had drifted down from higher up.

It had gotten steadily darker the longer I fell, to the point where I was now feeling out the wall of the tower by the mana inside the stone, and using invocations to keep track of the distance to the rough stone of the chasm on the other side while doing my best to keep myself in the middle of the two. That wasn’t working so well anymore, not with the gap shrinking down to something that could be measured in feet, so I cut my free fall with a flight spell and went into a controlled drop instead.

It was almost as fast as falling naturally, but with significantly more maneuverability and, more importantly to me, the ability to stop on command instead of splattering into the stone at high speed. I dove for another ten minutes or so, still not reaching the bottom, until something caught my attention.

It was a stone jutting out of the chasm wall at an angle, shaped perfectly into a cube. There was no magic left in it, but there was a door frame cut into one side. I flew over cautiously to examine the thing, unsure of what might be living inside. Thus far, I’d seen nothing besides mana wraiths, but there were plenty of subterranean monsters that were well-adapted to withstand heavy mana. I didn’t know how many were left alive after all this time, but I wasn’t about to rush in blindly.

I scried the strange cube, roughly thirty feet to a side, and found that the interior was familiar to me. Though it’d been a few years, relative to my own life, since I’d seen it, this was clearly one of my old vaults. The mysteel door had been torn asunder, the contents plundered, and the wards long since dead. Only the layout and designs served as evidence of its purpose.

A wave of sadness rolled through me. I’d long suspected that my former home had been destroyed. If nothing else, the cataclysmic loss of the world core’s mana would have seen it withered away. But now I was sure it hadn’t even made it that far. Ammun had built his tower in the middle of my home, destroying the Night Vale in every meaningful way even as he stole everything he could get his hands on from my treasuries, archives, and workshops.

It was somewhat sobering to have the proof in front of me. The slight possibility that the vault had been ripped out of the Night Vale whole and relocated here was so unlikely as to be dismissed outright, which meant that everything I’d spent two thousand years working for truly was gone. All I had left now was my memories, which would have to be enough. I’d rebuild, but it would take centuries to regain everything Ammun had stolen.

I abandoned the broken vault after salvaging the mysteel door. Damaged as it was, mysteel was so valuable that I was sure I could find a use for this piece. Then I continued my descent into the depths until, finally, half an hour later, my feet touched the stone. The tower kept going, of that I was sure. An earth sense spell gave me enough feedback to feel the wall of it burrowed a thousand feet deeper underground. A spell with a stronger range would no doubt confirm that it kept going even farther down.

Perhaps I would be able to go deeper on the other side of the tower. I sent scrying spells out in either direction, seeking a new drop to keep exploring, but there was nothing of any significance. I could get down maybe another thousand feet a bit to the north, but it looked like my exploration ended here.

Or maybe not. Now that I was down on the bottom and had been here for a bit, I realized that the mana currents were curling back into the tower. It wasn’t hard to trace their path to some sort of giant vent built into the side of the wall, the very first and only feature I’d ever seen interrupt the smooth, silver-gray surface. A quick examination revealed dozens more vents, all granting access to the tower’s interior as long as I could withstand the extreme mana pressure.

I hesitated only for a second to confirm that my mana reserves were adequate, then flew into the vent.