The world didn't end. It just stopped being the world I knew.
One second the platform was solid under my boots. The next I was somewhere else entirely, and my stomach stayed on the platform.
I hit my knees hard on packed earth.
"Oh," I said. "Oh that's. Yeah."
My mouth watered in the specific way that precedes either vomiting or a very bad decision. I swallowed. Swallowed again. Put one hand flat on the ground and focused on the texture of it because the alternative was throwing up on my first day in the Tower and I would genuinely never recover from that emotionally.
The ground was cold. Real. Dense with something older than soil.
I looked up.
The canopy.
I don't have a word for it. I have the word forest but that word is doing the job of a shovel when what the moment needed was a cathedral. The trees above me were wrong in scale the way a whale is wrong in scale when you see it in person for the first time. Trunks thicker than buildings. Not metaphorically. Wider than the apartment block I grew up in, each one, dark-barked and dense, rising so high that the eye lost them before they ended. The canopy itself spread across the sky like the sky had been replaced by a second layer of world. Leaves the size of car hoods filtered the light into something greenish and low, the kind of light that exists at the bottom of a lake, and in the gaps between the canopy you could see more canopy above that, and above that, more still.
There was no wind.
That was the part that hit different. No wind. The air sat completely still and smelled of wet bark, old growth, and something else underneath both that I had no reference for. Not bad. Not good. Just old. Older than anything on Earth and uninterested in my opinion of it.
I turned slowly on my knees and the scale of it didn't change. It extended in every direction. Trees and more trees and shadows that the filtered light couldn't reach. The undergrowth was dense at ground level, thick-leaved plants that looked familiar until you got close enough to see they weren't quite right. Leaves with too many veins. Colours that didn't match what photosynthesis should produce.
A bird called from somewhere in the canopy. I looked up instinctively. Nothing visible. The sound echoed between trunks until it became ambient and then disappeared.
I was here. Actually here. The Tower. Floor One.
I'd spent ten years hearing about this place. Reading about it on forums when I was supposed to be sleeping. Watching climbing footage on a cracked phone in whatever group home I was in that year, memorizing the layout of a place I was never supposed to see because the stone would make it clear I didn't belong, and then the stone had made exactly that clear and then something else had pulled me through anyway and here I was on my knees in the Ancient Forest with a secondhand blade on my hip and two thousand Ash of debt and zero stats across everything.
The bird called again.
I got back to my feet.
"Okay," I said quietly, to nobody.
"And we are LIVE!"
I turned around.
Cassia stood ten feet behind me, her Eye device positioned on a small tripod she had produced from somewhere on her person, the lens angled to catch both her face and the forest behind her. She'd done something to her hair in the approximately thirty seconds since we landed. The ponytail was neater. Her expression had transformed completely from the barely conscious woman who couldn't speak before chocolate into someone who looked like she'd been awake for hours.
"Good morning chat, it is your girl Cassia, it is an absolutely beautiful Floor One morning, I am feeling incredible, the forest is looking fresh, and." She paused for effect. Turned. Pointed at me with one finger. "Guess who came back."
I looked at the finger. Then at the device.
"The rogue from last night!" Her voice went up. "He came back! He said he was gonna run today and he actually showed up, I know, I know, chat I am as surprised as you are."
"I said I'd be there."
"He talks!" She waved at the device. "Come say hi to chat."
I walked over. Stood beside her. The Eye device was small but the lens had a quality to it that suggested it was not cheap. Eight thousand viewers. Whatever number was watching right now.
I looked into the lens.
"Name's Nox," I said. "And I'm going to be the fastest climber to hit Level Two."
Cassia's smile went sharp at the edges. "Bold claim."
"Not a claim. A schedule."
"He says 'not a claim, a schedule', chat." She turned back to me. "You're F-rank zeros across everything. You know that right? I checked last night."
"I was F-rank zeros last night."
"You've been in Veilgate for twelve hours."
"Thirteen. I counted."
She looked at me for a second. Then she laughed, and it was the real one, not the camera one. The difference was obvious once you'd heard both. "Okay chat, he is either very confident or genuinely stupid, and based on last night I honestly cannot tell you which, we are going to find out together."
"Can be both."
"It absolutely can." She picked the tripod up and repositioned it on her shoulder, holding it with one hand while the lens stayed trained on the forest ahead. "Okay. So chat, for those of you who weren't here last night, Nox is a Rogue. Fresh off the stone. First Tower run ever. We are doing a Floor One beginner run which I do at least three times a week so this is home turf for me, but for him."
She tilted the lens toward me. "This is a whole new experience."
"I feel great about it."
"He feels great about it." She started walking. I fell into step beside her. "Last time I brought a fresh climber on a run he screamed at the first wolf pack."
"I'm not going to scream."
"That's what he said too."
"Did he cry after?"
"A little bit."
"I'm also not going to do that."
===
A/N:
Welcome to the end of the chapter, Chat. You want to see Nox rob the Tower blind and build his shadow army?
Then feed the algorithm.
Add this to your library, drop those Power Stones and Golden Tickets like Beast Cores, and flood the comments.
Every comment tells me to keep pushing the pace, and every Stone keeps the chapters flowing.
Don't be a lurker, let me know you're climbing with us!