RETURN TO THE TOWER

RETURN TO THE TOWER, by Harry Piper, Audio by The Bard

 

I was born in his shadow, in a sense, though I suppose we all were; the sorcerer’s great tower of silvered glass threw its shade across our valley, across our village and across every man, woman and child who lived there.

The name of my village was Dimenu. You shall not find it in any chronicle or record of note, for we paid no tribute to any king, queen or emperor. We knew nothing of the world and the world knew nothing of us.

My mother told me signs and portents attended my own birth – a fiery comet streaking emerald flame across the skies at night. A red cow giving birth to a calf as pure white as fresh snow. A whole flock of birds falling dead from the sky, stricken by an unseen power.

Perhaps these signs were intended for me. Perhaps not – wherever a sorcerer makes his home, strange things are sure to follow, after all. I do know that I was born a bastard, and that marked me from birth as a thing set apart far more than any portent could.

The people of my village have superstitions concerning bastards, like many such places; that we are supposed to bring bad luck. That we were exchanged in the cradle for one of the little people, and are not truly of mortal flesh. That we may even have within ourselves a talent for sorcery, may the gods prevent such a thing.

If any of these things are true I have yet to discover them. All I knew in my youth was that the other children were warned away from me, and that some men and women looked at me when I passed by as they would at a wild and dangerous beast that had found its way into their village.

Of course I was devoted to my mother. She had brought me into the world. She had persisted when her belly grew large and her condition could not be denied. The jibes of former friends, the cold silence from family, the pain of the event itself- she endured all of it when a handful of the right herbs and a little suffering would have solved everything.

My mother’s family gave us wood in the winters and a little food when the pantry was empty but to expect anything more was unthinkable. They would no more acknowledge us as kin than they would an outlaw.

It was difficult but my mother and I were happy, I think. She bore me at a young age – too young – but that led to a peculiar closeness born of our shared helplessness; two blind men clutching at one another as they stumbled about in a world of shadows.

Apart from my mother I never had any real friends – I might be tolerated by the other children but no more. It is a curious thing to have only oneself for a companion. I did not feel the pain of loneliness so much as the oddness of it. I began to think too much on myself – of my place in the world.

The world was full of great and wonderful things that all had their purpose. The wheat grew tall and white in the fields, the kestrel hunted, the stars turned while the winds rise and fell – everything had its place, but what of me? What was I made for?

My mother often told me that I was made for her to love and I to love her, but that answer did not satisfy me.

Our village had an easier time of it than most, I suppose. Raiders never dared to loot our barns or snatch our cattle. The misshapen beasts that crawl out of the dead cities on the blasted plains were never sighted on our hills. I cannot remember a single occasion on which our menfolk were called to arms. We had no ditch, no wall, no rampart, and no need for such.

The sorcerer kept these things at bay. We all knew it. The great and awful tower that rose up into the clouds was a shield against the horrors of the world. Some, I knew, were grateful.

We did not know why he sent his servants to steal away our men, our women and our children. No reason was ever offered, and there seemed to be little sense in who was taken – old men and babes in arms were just as likely to be borne away as men and women in the flower of their youth, at any time and in any season.

It was easiest when they were taken unseen, by stealth. An empty bed with a broken window, found in the morning, was preferable to watching the thing unfold in broad daylight – swarms of hideous insect-like things with human faces and bodies of iron that flew down from the sky, tearing screaming men, women and children from the hands of their loved ones.

Of course some would fight, and every so often an arrow or an axehead would find its mark and one of the things would collapse into a shuddering heap of bleeding iron. But they were too many and too strong.

There were never any reprisals for resistance. What would be the point? If his servants wanted you it did not matter whether you fought, run or hid. You would be found and taken.

Our numbers remained steady, but enough were stolen to leave no family untouched by the horror. And yet we remained.

We hated the Sorcerer, but as one hates famine or disease. He had been in our valley and in that tower for generations – the old men said there had never been a time when it had not been so. He was simply a cruel but necessary part of the world. I think we had forgotten that he was a man like any of us; a thing of flesh, driven by will and passions.

I cannot remember the moment when I first conceived of killing him. I lost playmates to his servants, but that was not the spark. Nor the sight of grieving parents or families. I think it had always been with me. The idea of it grew sharper over time, but the desire had always lain there.

It was a simple matter for a child. The sorcerer preyed upon us because he could. Because we were weak and he was strong. This was wrong, and ought to be rectified.

Of course others had tried. Once in a generation a band of desperate men and women might make an attempt, and the stories passed on by the occasional half-mad survivor made for excellent legends, twisted as they were by the passage of time and the failing of memory.

It was said the gatehouse of the Tower was guarded by a pair of great stone gargoyles who never slept, keeping watch with blazing, lidless eyes of flame.

It was said the lower floors were filled with the monstrous offspring of the sorcerer, preying on intruders and one another for his own twisted amusement.

It was said that there were such sights in that tower that would shatter your mind should you merely glance at them.

Of the sorcerer himself, nothing was said at all. No story told of what lay in his inner chambers.

I told my mother of my designs from a young age. She gently mocked me when I was a child, scolded me as I grew into maturity and when it became clear I would not be dissuaded from my object, wept whenever I spoke of it. Eventually I kept my silence on the matter.

Apart from the circumstances of my birth I was not so very different from the other young men of my village. I worked the fields, swam in the rivers, played and fought, flirted and courted (without much success). I do not believe I was the strongest or the swiftest, but I could defend myself and throw myself into conflict with an obstinacy the others found exhausting.

I learnt the use of a bow and a staff. I knew how to till a field. I could track game. As for learning, I was just as ignorant as the rest of them – it would be many years before I could so much as write my own name.

The years passed almost wholly without incident until, one day, a passing caravan of soldiers stopped near our village.

Their arrival was met with curiosity rather than alarm, protected as we were by the sorcerer’s presence. A small party of warriors led by a man in a gleaming bronze helm came into the village. They set up their standard – a red lion on a green plain – and announced they were recruiting.

It did not take me half a day to make my decision.

I told my mother and she would not accept it. She tried to stop me, and the last sight I had of my mother before I left was a woman on her knees, screaming with grief. I have tried very hard to forget it, without success.

Three others went with me. The man in the bronze helm offered three pieces of gold and whatever we could lay our hands on in the course of the campaign as payment. I did not inquire into the justice of their cause. We swore an oath of loyalty to a prince we had never heard of, gathered our things, said our goodbyes and then we left.

I did not do it for the gold, the excitement or the escape. I saw it as the means to an end. A poor, ignorant villager would never be able to kill a sorcerer. A warrior might.

 

***

 

Prince Efnisien was his name – the first man I fought for. I barely remember it. There was so much for me to learn in those early days.

My life had thus far been bound to a single valley untouched by the concerns or attentions of the outside world. Now I had shieldbrothers who came from the golden cities of Shem, the ruins of Tarshak, the Plains of Denos and many more besides. It was as if a great tapestry was being unfurled before a man who had never previously known sight; an impossibly vast image rich with detail, colour and incident. I was overwhelmed by it. Battle would concentrate my mind.

My first taste of it came at a ford downstream from our camp, two months into the campaign. Two of my companions from my village were already dead, but from disease. The enemy had yet not deigned to give battle – he was content to whittle us down by sickness, by raids and by ambushes. I walked into one of the latter when sent out with eight others in a foraging party.

He hid in the trees, waiting until we crossed the ford before showering us with a hail of missiles. We lost two dead right away – Kolun and Garec, both from the Eseda Isles. Then he came out to meet us- ten men with shaved heads, iron axes and painted faces, screaming like devils.

Someone cried out and I could feel the panic threatening to take hold of us. Garec was the one in charge, but he was lying there on the stones with an arrow in his head. No-one else appeared to know what to do, so I bellowed at them to stand and fight.

And, as if by a miracle, they listened. In the fight that followed we lost another killed and two wounded, but we got four of theirs.

I killed one of them myself. My first of many. Scrawny man with a cut across his cheek. He wore a little seashell necklace around his neck, such as a child might make. He left his guard open and I pierced his lung. He died choking.

The rest scattered, we picked over the corpses, grabbed our dead and wounded and headed back to camp. We told the captains of what had happened, and by the way they looked at me I knew I had accomplished something. They gave me a sword of iron and gave me command over some of my comrades. This was how I learned I had a talent for war.

I led more foraging parties. Then I planned ambushes. I sent out scouts, and led raids. We won most of them, lost a few, came to a stalemate in a handful. But I made my men feel like conquerors no matter the issue. They came to love me, and by the time of the first true battle of our campaign I held the front of the line.

The enemy stood waiting for us on a hill crowned with a line of oaks. We came up against him singing and after an hour of bloody struggle broke him. We pursued him for miles, filling the fields with his dead.

This was how I learned I had a love of war.

War is a terrible business – of that there can be no doubt. Most of it is dull beyond description. Endless marching, digging and watching; if you are easily bored you will never make a good warrior. Disease and famine are a marching armies constant companions, and you will watch many a good man die before you even see the enemy.

You will lay waste to green fields. You will drive the peasant from his home. You will bring fear and distress to the innocent. You will fill the furrows with blood where seeds should have lain, and the only fruit will be bad dreams and bad memories.

All these things are true. But war is beauty and wonder, too.

To see a thousand spears on the march, rising and falling like a vast wave, iron glittering under the sun. To see the golden campfires of an army spread out under the night sky like another field of stars. To forget yourself entirely in the shieldwall – to become one flesh with a thousand others. To have found, for a few brief hours, ones place in the world.

We won the battle, but it was not much of a victory. As it turned out, the prince for whom we fought had received a wound during the fighting – a javelin in his thigh. He removed it and kept fighting only to fall out of the saddle just as the enemy broke. He died in the night.

A bitter end for most of us. But I found treasure enough on the bodies of the fallen to recompense me for my labour.

What bothered me far more than the death of a prince I had barely known was the feeling of emptiness that filled me as I sat by the campfire that night. I knew I would feel the same even if our prince had lived. The campaign was done. No more marching. No more raids. No more battles.

I had tasted war, but I knew it was not enough. I needed more of it. I needed to know what it felt like to truly command. I had spent my first battle in the front of the line, but I wanted to be where our prince was – mounted, in armour, with the power of true authority. I went to bed frustrated and weary.

That night, I dreamt of the Tower.

I left early the next morning, wandering for a while before ending up in a port city. I spent some days listening to the talk of the old warriors, who spent their last years and coins in the backs of taverns, murmuring about wars and rumours of wars. Then I boarded a ship going to a land undergoing an invasion by a great host of horsemen from the Far North.

Upon my arrival I made my way to the native kings and offered them my services. My scars, my iron sword and, perhaps, my impetuosity must have impressed them. At first I had command of a small troop. As the war progressed and opportunities were given me to show my quality, they promoted me until I was one of those captains who rode in the van and who gave counsel to the kings themselves.

We had drawn back all through the autumn and winter, burning our crops and letting the enemy exhaust himself in the pursuit. But he managed to corner us in the foothills of a mountain range, the name of which I can no longer remember.

I do remember the last night of counsel before the day of battle. Grim faces and weary voices. We had learned the enemy had obtained a great new weapon – a sorcerer had joined his ranks.

I had never seen a sorcerer in the flesh. Few of us had, and I suspect many would have abandoned the battle with little persuasion if not for the fiery words of one of the older captains – a squat, hairless little man with a crooked nose.

A sorcerer, he told us, was a great danger, true, but one that could be removed with just a little courage and cunning. Sorcerers might be killed by blade, arrow or club, the same as any other man, the stories notwithstanding. He had seen it done.

He proposed that we send a small party of horsemen out between the lines in the early hours of the morning, when it was barely light and the ground was still covered in frost. We would ambush the sorcerer as he came up ahead of the main host.

Of course I was one of the first volunteers for what many in that last meeting considered a hopeless mission. We were barely fifty men who, in the cold and silent darkness of a winter night, led our horses down from the safety of the hills and our camp to a little copse only a few bowshots away from the enemy line, there to spend a sleepless night in waiting.

I had no great expectation of success, but neither did I feel much fear. Mostly I was impatient for the contest to begin.

The enemy greeted the sunrise by a storm of horns, shouts and songs. We readied our weapons and whispered a few prayers. I was to the rear – I could see little of what lay ahead, past the trees. But then came some urgent whispers from the lookouts, terse orders in low voices, a great shout, and then we galloped out into the stark morning daylight.

The sorcerer rode under his own banner. A young man in a yellow cloak with long black hair. He was attended by a small troop of guards but I saw at once they were too far ahead of the rest of the host. I think he saw it, too – there was fear on his face.

I knew then we would succeed. It did not matter to me when he burned half of us into ash with a great wave of white fire, or when a flung dart cut off half my ear. He was a man like the rest of us – weak, confused, afraid and uncertain.

I was the one to do it. I broke through his guards and tore towards him heedless of all danger. If ever Fate or the Gods ever shielded a man from harm it was in that moment.

I could see every detail of his face. As he flung up his arms with a wild cry of despair I planted my spear in his chest.

It was easy to break them after that. I remember smearing a white cloth with my blood soaked hand and raising it into the air as a makeshift banner. The enemy knew me. Wherever I rode they could not hope to stand. The details of the battle itself are lost to me – I was in an ecstatic daze such as only saints and madmen know.

We celebrated our victory amid the mounds of the dead as dusk drew in. I sat with the kings and princes and they praised me. Thousands of men chanted my name. I was drunk with victory and elation – I could almost believe I had achieved the purpose for which I had been born. I went to bed drunk, happy and at peace.

I dreamt again of the Tower.

I dreamt I fought my way to the summit and found there a great golden door. I opened it to find the sorcerer I had so recently slain seated on a throne of ash and dust. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came – just a flood of shadows.

I woke up determined to find the joy of our victory once again, seize it, and never let it go – but the war was over. In the grey of the dawn men were already beginning to head back home. I was offered a high place in more than one kingly court but I turned them all down. The old feeling of emptiness was swift to overtake me, and I knew I could not rest. I took a horse and as much treasure as I could carry and went west.

My story – my legend, rather – preceded me. Apparently I had slain the sorcerer, unaided, in single combat. Nonsense, but it was useful. I never lacked for opportunities after that.

I fought in thirty campaigns, all told. I marked the passage of time by the march of armies. I won most and lost a few, though I doubt my presence was decisive in any but a bare handful of them.

Far more importantly, three more sorcerers were delivered into my hands in the process.

Petryos the Summoner – he who went into battle with a company of stone golems. I lay in wait for him in a marsh for two days and two nights with a handful of picked men. I watched his stone giants move slowly and clumsily in the wet ground while he, a fat man borne along in a litter, directed them ineffectually. He didn’t even see us until it was too late.

Dressini of the Blazing Eye. She could take the light of the sun and steal it away, leaving whole towns and cities in pitch black darkness. We attacked her camp at midnight before she had a chance to practice her art on us. She was trampled in the chaos.

Grettir the Battlemad, who was at least as much a warrior as a sorcerer. By some enchantment he had made himself immune to any weapon – steel and iron left no mark on him. In our first engagement by a shallow river I fought my way to him and, after a struggle, drowned him in the waters.

I have fought in deserts, plains, mountains, oceans and forests the world over. I have taken cities and watched them burn. I have crowned kings with my own hands on more than one occasion. I have known the shame of retreat and the joy of victory. I have drunk wine in halls of gold and sucked the marrow from bones in filthy hovels. Every kind of loss and gain, pain and pleasure; none of it was unfamiliar to me.

I knew power and wealth the likes of which most men could only dream of, but I could get no lasting happiness from them. I was loved and I was known but I still felt the same bastard child as I had decades earlier; an awkward thing out of place, without purpose.

I could have carved out something for myself, I suppose. Men less gifted and even more basely born than myself had done so. With a handful of battles and a little blood I could have built myself a kingdom, or an empire. But what are those, in the end? Words written on running water. You will know this if you travel as long and as widely as I have. We tread on the graves of a thousand empires every day. Look to the mountains and the oceans – these are the only things that really last. All else is naught but a shade.

Love was something I found hard to grasp. I knew something of the bonds forged in war; of friendship, and even of the occasional romantic dalliance. But the love that men and women devote their lives to – the love that begets generations down the centuries- was beyond me. I could see it around me and even feel its presence, at times, but it remained but a vague and insubstantial thing, like a spirit glimpsed under moonlight.

I had forgotten nearly everything of my village. I could not remember its name, nor that of my neighbours – even my mother’s face was beginning to fade.

But the Tower came to me every night in my dreams. Sharp and as solid as ever. It would not let me forgot it, nor the unspoken oath I had made.

I had to go back.

It took me two years of searching to find it. Two years of retracing my steps – finding traces of that impetuous youth who, if I met him on the road, would be a stranger to me. And when I did find it I barely recognised what I had found.

The valley, the river, the fields – there was only a vague recognition there. Of the village itself I could remember nothing at all. It seemed barely deserving of the name – a loose collection of huts surrounding a common. A foraging party would consider it unworthy of their attention.

The people hid from me. I saw frightened faces behind closed doors and half-hidden in the fields. Well they might fear an armed stranger on an armoured horse, with a scarred and weathered face. I called out to them, telling them my name. Most did not recognise it but a few did. These approached me warily. I don’t think they entirely believed my story, and their fear was obvious even with my assurances.

My mother, I swiftly learned, was gone.

Not taken, thank the Heavens – just a sickness that had swept through the village one summer. I went to her grave, and when I stood above it like a shamefaced deserter slinking back to his standard memories of our life together came back with a sharpness that left me shaken.

Her holding my hands in hers, gripping a fishing rod as she taught me to fish for the first time. Her joyful smile when I brought her a fresh bloom of red flowers from the fields. Her sudden cry of alarm when I cut myself whittling. Her anguished tears, at our parting.

I spent more time there than I wished to. After that, all that was left was the Sorcerer.

The Tower was just as it ever had been. Just as impossibly vast. Just as impossibly high. I asked for no help from the villagers – for what aid could they possible give me? I approached it alone.

I was scared – terrified, even. Fear will not leave you even after a hundred battles, and he who says different is a liar or a madman. But there was an excitement there, too, and a sense of awe. The kind of awe a man feels when he approaches the altar of some strange and terrible god.

The closer I came to the Tower the more the trees and the grass faded away, until I was walking on lifeless, hard-packed earth turned grey, which threw up choking clouds of dust. My horse refused to go any closer so I dismounted and continued on foot.

The gatehouse was flanked by two monstrous gargoyles of living stone, each one taller than an oak and twice as wide. Their burning red eyes followed me as I approached, and as I reached the entrance their voices rang out like the pealing of a stone bell –

Turn back, son of man, turn back. We are the least of our master’s servants, and we have consumed thousands of thy kin. Turn back.

Their mouths remained open, and from them came forth a flood of noise that nearly unmanned me; the last moments of those who had gone before me. A thousand screams, pleas and curses amid the sounds of tearing flesh and cracking bones.

I came on anyway, and they moved faster than you would have believed. But I was prepared.

With the ring of Petryos the Summoner, Shaper and Singer of Stone, I raised up a hand and, with a single word of power, held them. Then I wrenched their limbs from their sockets. I tore their eyes from their heads. I reached into their bodies and twisted them until they roared.

The ring broke under the strain but I was triumphant. One of them still lived as I stepped over their remains, a broken eye in a broken head swivelling to stare at me as I passed into the Tower.

Turn back. You know not what you do. Turn back.

Inside, the walls were alive with hundreds of faces. Faces of friends and enemies. Faces of family – my mother, weeping as I left her. Abandoned her. They groaned and screamed, chanting warnings at me I was stalked down the long and empty hall.

Turn back, son of man, turn back. There is nothing here for you but pain.

The lower levels were filled with engines and creatures long-since abandoned, their purpose forgotten, I think, even to themselves. There were things like men with the head of beasts. Bronze men like statues who breathed steam. Scuttling, many-legged things in the dark with the voices of children. Most feared me and hid themselves. A few gazed silently at me as I went by, unmoved by the first appearance of an intruder in their domain for generations.

Some fought me in such combat that I had never faced in all my years of war. But my arm was strong and my will unfailing, even if my courage had fled. My iron sword bent and was broken under their assaults but even with a hilt and a jagged shard I was victorious. I left their broken bodies behind me as a warning to the others. Their remains were quickly consumed by the scuttling things.

It was as I climbed higher that I encountered those ghastly insect-things that had preyed so heavily upon my village. I should have died a thousand deaths, had it not been for the Wolfskin I had taken from the bloated corpse of Grettir the Battlemad.

Their steel did not touch me. They screamed in frustrated rage while I roared with laughter, tearing through their ranks with ease. They tore the Wolfskin to shreds but not before I raised their corpses up in heaps.

Eventually I came upon the chambers in which these creatures had been birthed, or made – and such was the horror I encountered even now I shall not speak of it. I destroyed everything I could and continued my ascent.

Higher and higher I climbed, untouched by weariness, but I was swiftly faced by a new obstacle. The walls, the ceiling and the floor all faded until I was walking on a strange formless darkness – my feet rested on a night sky without stars. But I was not alone. There were things that walked through the darkness, their bodies burning with a searing golden flame that nearly blinded me. They never spoke. They never made a sound. But they hunted me relentlessly.

They tore my armour from me and seared my flesh with their touch. My mortal weapons were useless against them – blades simply melted where they met that luminous flesh.

But I had the Circlet of the Blazing Eye, taken from the mangled body of Dressini the Light-Binder. I had almost forgotten it after what I had seen below. I was on the verge of being overwhelmed before I finally used it.

I tore their skin from their bodies – I flayed them, ripping away their light-flesh to reveal bodies of pale mist that swiftly faded away. With their stolen light I was able to restore form and colour to the walls and floor of the tower. I continued my ascent.

I walked for quite some time. Days or weeks – I was unable to tell. My surroundings became hatefully stark. Bare white walls, bare white floor, bare white ceiling. There was a harsh, unsparing light that blazed from every surface. My footsteps echoed down the empty halls.

I slept curled up against the walls, hands pressed into my eyes so that the unbearable whiteness of the tower might be kept at bay. I did not dream. But I did hear things in the halls – whispers of conversation.

I did not mean it. I would not have, had I known.

But where are we now? Is there a chance?

Still time. Still time.

Their names are gone. Their faces, too. Were they real? They must have been. They must have been.

Voices not quite of fear but of an anxious confusion – a man who has lost something precious but cannot admit it.

I think I lost myself for a little while in those long corridors. The unending blankness did something to my mind – muddying thoughts and dissolving resolution until I could no longer recall why I was there.

I passed several little piles of bones and cloth on my way, each one placed upon against a wall, the remains curled up with no obvious signs of violence. I had not been the first to make it so far.

I nearly joined them. Nearly gave up, and more than once. Nearly let the soft despair hold me close and drown me in weariness. But the niggling thought that I had something important left to accomplish never left me, along with the vague sense that I would disappoint someone important if I failed.

How I made it out I am not sure. Perhaps I was too well-used to the endless and seemingly purposeless marches that fill a warrior’s life – those endeavors where despair and exhaustion mingle to create a single, mindless state of exertion where one simply continues until one is unable to.

However it was, somehow I succeeded – or was allowed to succeed – where all others had failed. I made it to the summit, where the sorcerer made his home.

There were no guards. No traps, no locks and no barriers. He lived in a small room where most of the space was taken up by books and parchment. There were fine tapestries on the walls, and a rich carpet underfoot. A fine layer of dust lay on everything. Wherever I stepped I would disturb a little storm of it.

There was a casement looking out onto the valley below. The height of it seemed wrong – I was at the summit after climbing for days, yet by the position of the window it seemed as if I had gone no higher than a hundred feet. It was late evening outside, and I could hear birdsong – nightingales.

He lay in a bed fit for a king – a diminutive, withered figure marooned in a sea of bedclothes. His skin was waxy with a yellowish tint, his eyes sunken and his arms withered. Only the movement of his chest told me I looked at a living man rather than a corpse.

I stared at him for some time. He did not appear to have noticed my arrival until, to my astonishment, he slowly raised a hand and beckoned me to come closer. It appeared to take most of his strength to do so.

Should I have slain him then and there? I had enough cause. Perhaps I had not suffered directly at his hands, but I had seen more than enough evidence of his crimes in my ascent. My village had suffered for generations under his rule. I had killed men for far less.

But he was a frail old man. This was not war, where events propelled you to such an extent that you lost yourself in it. In that room everything had been slowed and softened and even, perhaps, clarified – I do not know whether what followed was born of cowardice, confusion or something else entirely.

I went forward. It did not occur to me that I should have been afraid or wary of him. Neither did I suspect some kind of trick or illusion. Such ideas, in fact, seemed faintly ridiculous – somehow I knew what was about to happen would be the most true thing I had ever experienced in my life.

He did not open his eyes. He could barely speak – he mouthed a few strained whispers that might have been words. I stood by him, watching him struggle to talk. Finally he held out a hand to me. I took it.

I saw his life in a moment.

I saw a child born into circumstances a great deal worse than my own. I saw that child grow up nourished by the contempt and hatred of others, nursing his resentment and desire for power. I saw the birth of his sorcerous power in fire and thunder, and the bloody swathe he had cut across the land. I saw him play at the roles of king, priest, emperor and god, and grow swiftly bored with all of them.

I saw him build a great tower of stone, machinery and magic – a tower more intimately connected to himself than the heart is to the body. There, he told himself, he would have peace, power and safety, and would live a life of contentment, study and pleasure.

I saw him enjoy himself, for a time. He sought for, and found, the forbidden books of C’Tik, and read the prophecies therein. He called up the shades of great scholars long-dead and questioned them about their discoveries. He left his body on numerous occasions and travelled to the outer rim of this plane, and saw things in the darkness between worlds which would drive lesser men mad.

I saw him make for himself legions of servants – warriors, counsellors, friends and lovers, using for his building material the folk of the valley below. Most he would eventually destroy, having grown bored with them, and a few would be forgotten entirely; they wandered his halls in darkness, still calling out for their master and creator in the lower depths of the Tower.

I saw the slowly growing despair as he realised he could not even name the thing he sought for. The dawning realisation that he had not a single true friend. The cold truth that even if love or affection were offered to him he would be incapable of recognising or returning it.

I saw that there was something else, too, and something worse – he was too tightly bound to the tower. Memory and strength faded but he was not released. Old age had no consummation.

In desperation he tried to do away with himself, but nothing worked. Blades became softer than feathers when they touched flesh, the foulest poisons were as water and a strong rope felt lighter than silk. He felt the pangs and weakness of hunger and thirst but they did not destroy him.

His servants refused any orders that would lead to his harm, of course. He tried to leave the tower but the hidden paths and doors had faded from his mind. He spent years wandering the halls but it was to no avail; he was a prisoner.

Finally he retired to his bed. He watched the many failed attempts on his fortress by the people of the valley in despair.

I saw that, in one last act of desperation, using what little remained of his power, he sent a seed of life down into the valley – a seed that contained something of his own essence, thoughts and desires.

Whether it would find a host he did not know. Whether the resultant life would survive he did not know. All he knew was that, if it did, it would be driven back to the Tower, and there finally accomplish what he himself could not.

His hand slipped from mine. It was over.

I think I was stunned into numbness, at first. I distinctly remember lying on the floor beside the bed, staring at the ceiling, my mind empty. The rage and sorrow came after.

I screamed at him. I cursed him. I denounced him. I threatened the vilest tortures. I sworn I would never lay a finger on him. My mother was foremost in my thoughts and I threw her name at him like an oath.

There was a panic in me, too. How much of what I had done was from him rather than myself? To be tricked was something I could bear, but to be nothing but a simple tool made for one bloody purpose and no other – no, I could not endure that.

Then came the dilemma – what was I to do? His crimes deserved death – for what he had done to my mother and for what he had done to me alone. Justice demanded his blood. But if I killed him I would be giving in to his demands. I would be fulfilling his deepest desire. It maddened me to the point where I lost my reason.

I slew him, in the end. What else could I have done? And what need have I to tell you of the manner in which I did it? It was simple matter, and one best left unsaid.

I set a fire going in his chambers and left. Nothing detained me. I watched the tower burn from the village. There were strange colours above it in the sky that night and for many nights to come. Misshapen creatures fled across the skies and fields, while ghastly screams could be heard echoing from within. It was a week or more before the flames died out, and it was only with the winter snows that the last embers were finally smothered.

The others cheered and wept on the night of their deliverance, but their joy did not touch me. I went to the grave of my mother and lay down there to sleep, praying I would not wake.

 

***

 

But of course the next day came and I woke up cold and stiff in the grey of a new morning. I thought, briefly, of destroying myself, but I felt it would be another kind of failure and, worse, an insult to my mother. A poor repayment.

I left and wandered again, for a while, but the old battle-lust had left me. I think that part of me died with the sorcerer. I took service with a few princes but never played the grand part I sought out when I was younger. When the spring campaigns ended I returned to the village, and eventually ceased my warring altogether.

Why did I return? They were in awe and not a little fear of me, so intimacy and genuine warmth were, for a while, impossible. But I had no other home and no other people. They gave me a field and a handful of cattle, and taught me how to tend to them, for I had long-forgotten what I had known in my youth.

I was able to help them in turn. They no longer lived in fear of the sorcerer but there were other things to be afraid of – things that, under the sorcerers twisted protection, they had never experienced. So I helped them dig a ditch and build a palisade for our village. I trained the militia, and led them on a few occasions.

The sorrow of what I had done and what had been done to me has never quite left me. I spent many mornings at my mother’s grave, trying and failing to come up with the words to say that would absolve me of the pain I caused her; but how could I repent for my own existence?

I still felt keenly the Question of my purpose. An answer had been provided, but it was simply and hopelessly insufficient.

There were times when I would return to the ruins of the Tower in search of some kind of resolution. I walked alone through halls of blackened stone, but already the place seemed much diminished; more of a ruined watchtower than the home of a fearful sorcerer. Ivy crept through the broken walls and birds made their nests among gaps in the stones. I never found anything there to satisfy me.

And yet I was, eventually, happy. Almost against my will, but joy still found me. Helping the others at harvest time, enjoying a good meal or simply watching the stars slowly turn on clear nights – the simple pleasures of the world were a balm for my troubled mind.

The distance of the villagers faded over time. They became used to me, and if the older men and women remembered my portent-marked birth and my great deed the younger folk had heard only stories, and seen only the pile of ruins hardly suitable to be called a tower.

I became a storyteller. I had seen much of the world and its wonders, and in the long winter days and nights when there was little else to do but huddle together before a fire the children and not a few of the men and women would listen to me, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as I poured out tales of heroism, magic and glory.

As the winters passed – as my hair grew grey and then white, as my back bent and I was forced to walk with a staff – I was no longer the feared warrior who had slain a sorcerer. I was Grandfather, the strange old man who nonetheless told the best stories and never complained if an apple or two were snatched from his tree.

There have been many times in my life when, if I have not found the answer to the Question, then at the very least I can no longer feel it – when I carry out the tasks needed to raise a good crop or see to the ailments of a sick cow, when I speak with my neighbours, when I tell stories to the children; when I lose myself in the mundanity of life.

I am old indeed now, and can no longer work or tell stories as I once did. The days grow ever-shorter and I think one day soon my own sun shall flicker out of life like a candle that has been left to burn too long.

And I have been dreaming of the Tower again. Almost every night.

The dream is always the same. I rise from my bed and walk out into the night. The sky is ablaze with stars of wondrous colours. The tower is ahead of me. I see it neither as it was nor as it is but something else entirely – it is difficult to describe. Awe-inspiring, with terrifying beauty, but somehow achingly familiar. I am drawn to it.

I walk the hallways, which are filled with people, some of whom I recognise- friends and enemies, all long gone. I do not tarry long with them for I know I am awaited at the summit.

The climb does not take long despite my age and the many steps. There is a chamber without a ceiling, lit entirely by starlight. There are two figures there, seated on thrones of gold, both of whom I know. Their faces shine with a light that I cannot look at directly, no matter how much I try.

But I am expected. I am welcome there. They present me with a gift – a small white stone, smooth and warm to the touch, that fits into the palm of my hand as if it were made for it.

And I know something about this stone. I know that if I turn it over I will find a word written there in a language known only to myself. It is my true name.

Of course I always wake up before I can see it. But the day will come when I have no need for the waking world. Then, I will return to the Tower, and finally lay claim to my inheritance.

 

________________________________________

Harry Piper lives in Wales and is constantly surrounded by too many books than are good for him.  He has long enjoyed reading and writing fantasy-  even more so ever since he discovered people are willing to pay him for the latter.  He hopes to continue doing it for a very long time.