Humans liked building towers.
A lot.
Faced with something big—power, knowledge, the unknown—someone would always look up and say, "Let's build something tall and poke it." So the world had a few of them.
The Tower of Magic on the Central Continent, where spellcraft was taken apart and put back together in lecture halls ringed with runes. The Dragon Tower in the South, all bloodline experiments and dangerous pride. The Constellation Tower in the North, cold and gleaming, built to study Purelight.
And the Ebony Tower in the West.
It rose more than a kilometre into a grey sky, a single needle of black obsidian so smooth it looked wet. It didn't reflect the light. It swallowed it. There were no banners on it, no carvings, nothing meant to be pretty. It didn't need to impress anyone. It had been doing that for a thousand years.
Faint veins of deeper shadow climbed its sides in slow spirals, like something breathing under the stone.
