Chapter 5: Stone

The stairs from Floor 2 ended in a wall of warm air.

Kael felt it before he saw the floor — a change in pressure against his eardrums, a thickening of the air that carried mineral dust and something else, something organic and wrong, like the smell of a wound that had sealed over but never healed. The amber torches lining the spiral staircase gave way to a different light below: a dull, pulsing orange that emanated from the stone itself, as if the walls on Floor 3 were faintly, bioluminescent.

He was still three turns above the landing when the clicking started.

It was not the shriekers. He knew the shriekers' click — the fine, precise sonar pulse he had carried in his skull for hours after reading the dead woman's echo. That sound was a whisper, a ghost-frequency his mind had filed away and mostly buried. This was different. This was a deeper pulse, slower, rhythmic, like the articulated movement of something heavy dragging itself across stone. Each click carried a resonant bass note that Kael felt in his teeth rather than heard through his ears.

He stopped walking. His hand went to the wall, pressing flat against the warm stone.

The clicking was not new.

He had heard it before. Not in the Tower — in Ashwick, in the final hour, when the sky had gone dark at midday and the sound had rolled across the village like distant thunder that didn't stop. Click-click-click. The sound of legs — how many legs? — moving through the wheat field behind his house. The sound of his sister saying What is that? and his mother saying Inside, now, inside and the sound getting louder, getting closer, getting inside the walls because the walls were thatch and wood and the thing outside was none of those things.

He had not remembered the sound as clicking. He had remembered it as chaos, as screaming, as the particular silence that followed when there was nothing left to scream. But his body remembered. His body had filed the sound in a place his conscious mind could not reach, and now his body was giving it back to him, one click at a time, as he descended the final stairs and saw Floor 3.

It was not what he expected.

The corridor was broad — wider than anything on Floors 1 or 2 — and the ceiling vaulted high enough that the torchlight barely touched the apex. The stone was dark, nearly black, veined with those bioluminescent threads that provided a secondary light source in shifting, organic patterns. The walls were not smooth. They were textured with shallow grooves that ran in parallel lines from floor to ceiling, as if something had scratched the surface in long, deliberate strokes.

And the grooves were fresh. Not centuries-old, not crystallized with age. Fresh. Dust sat in them. He could see the marks where whatever had made them had dragged, stopped, changed direction.

Scratch marks. The width of a blade, but not made by a blade. Made by something with hard edges. Something that dragged its body along walls the way a dog scratches itself against a fence post.

Click-click-click.

The sound was coming from ahead. From multiple sources. Not echoing — originating. Things ahead of them, moving in the dark.

"Pella." Maren's voice was a thread. "What do you see?"

Pella's hand signal came back: three fingers spread, held flat. Pause. Then she drew a slow arc in the air with two fingers. Three — no, four — circling. Then she brought her fist down, twice. Heavy.

Four creatures. Heavy. Circling.

Kael's mouth was dry. The clicking in his ears was layered now — the phantom echo from Floor 2 and the real sound from Floor 3 overlapping, the two frequencies interfering with each other to produce a dissonant hum that made his vision flicker at the edges. He pressed his palm harder against the wall. The stone pulsed with heat, and beneath the heat, the faintest vibration — not the echo hum, not the clicking, but the resonance he had felt on Floor 2, the sound of something sealed beneath the surface.

"Striders," Maren said. She said the word the way someone names a disease they have lived with for a long time.

Kael could not breathe.

She did not know what the word meant to him. None of them did. Maren had said it as a tactical label — the name of a Floor 3 creature class, the way she might say "shriekers" or "crawlers." A word in a bestiary. A threat level, an attack pattern, a known quantity.

But Kael had grown up in Ashwick, and Ashwick had been destroyed by a Strider.

Not a Tower Strider — a Strider that had left the Tower, that had walked across twenty leagues of open country and appeared at the edge of his village on a Tuesday afternoon in late summer, and killed every living thing it could reach. His mother. His father. The neighbors. The dogs. Old Wen the carpenter who had taught him to read. Mira.

His sister, who had been eleven years old and had been drawing a picture of him at his desk when the sound started, and who had looked up from her charcoal and said What is that? — the same question, in the same tone, as every child who has ever heard something they cannot name.

The clicking grew louder. The creatures were moving toward them — four of them, heavy bodies dragging through the dark, leaving scratches on the walls as they went.

Kael was shaking. He could feel it in his hands, in his knees, in the muscles of his jaw that had clenched so hard his teeth ached. The fear was not the low-grade Tower mortality awareness he had carried since Floor 1. This was something older, something that lived in the base of his brainstem and had been put there on a Tuesday afternoon when the sky went dark.

He had not seen the Strider clearly that day. He had been inside, pulling Mira toward the root cellar, and the creature had been outside, and between them had been a wall that splintered and a door that opened and a sound like wood screaming. He had seen it through the gap in the door — a mass of dark chitin and articulated legs, too many legs, moving with a terrible precision that nothing that large should have possessed. He had seen it turn its head — if it had a head, if the front end of the thing could be called a head — and look at him through the gap. And he had pulled Mira down into the cellar and sealed the door and listened to the village end above him.

He had survived. Mira had not. The creature had moved on, leaving Ashwick behind like a husk, and he had crawled out of the cellar into silence and ash.

And now here they were. Floor 3. The Tower. The place where they were supposed to stay.

"Maren." His voice cracked. He cleared his throat. "Maren — those things. Striders. I know what they are."

She glanced back. In the dim bioluminescent light, her face was all angles — jaw set, eyes narrowed, assessing. "You know their attack pattern?"

"They destroyed my village."

The words came out flat, stripped of inflection. A fact. A stone. He watched the information register on her face — not surprise, not sympathy, but a rapid recalculation, the way she processed every new piece of data in terms of its tactical weight.

"Can you function?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Then stay behind Fell, don't move, and don't make a sound. We handle this."

She turned forward, her prosthetic arm already reaching for the weapon at her hip — a short-hafted axe with a blade of Tower bone, the same pale material as her arm, edged with something darker that caught the ambient glow. Pella had her bow drawn, the string half-drawn against her cheek. Fell stepped forward, producing from his pack a metal rod that he unfolded into a short spear with a click.

They moved into the corridor. Kael stayed behind Fell, his back against the wall, his hands shaking, his teeth still clenched against the clicking that echoed through the Tower and through his memory at the same time.

The first Strider emerged from a side passage forty paces ahead.

It was larger than the one in Ashwick. The creature in his memory had been the size of a cart horse — terrible but comprehensible, a body with a scale you could hold in your mind. This thing was the size of a small wagon. Its body was a segmented mass of dark chitin, low-slung, supported by six legs that bent backward at angles that hurt to look at. Each leg terminated in a hooked claw that scraped the stone as it moved, producing the clicking sound — not a vocalization, not a signal, just the physical noise of hard material against hard material.

Its head — the forward end — was a wedge of interlocking plates that opened and closed in a rhythmic motion, revealing layers of mandible-like structures beneath. No eyes. It navigated by vibration, by sound, by the same mechanism the shriekers used but cruder, heavier, tuned to feel footsteps through stone rather than airborne sound.

Three more emerged behind it. They spread across the corridor in a line, legs clicking against the floor in a pattern that was not coordinated but not random either — each creature occupying a sector, each sector covering the width of the passage. They were not hunting. They were patrolling. Moving through their territory with the unhurried efficiency of animals that knew nothing in this space could threaten them.

Maren moved first.

She crossed the corridor in four fast strides, placing herself between the lead Strider and the party. Her stance was wide, her axe low. The prosthetic arm — left side, carved from Tower bone, reinforced with Echo Shard lattice that glowed faintly along its seams — took the forward grip while her natural right hand held the axe haft at the balance point.

The lead Strider registered her. Its mandibles clicked faster — the vibration of her footsteps, amplified by her heavy approach. It turned toward her, all six legs adjusting, the body dropping lower as it prepared to charge.

She did not wait for it.

The axe came up and around in a lateral swing that caught the creature across its left flank. The Tower bone blade bit through chitin with a sound like splitting ice — not clean, not easy, but deep enough. Dark fluid sprayed. The Strider screamed — a high, keening frequency that Kael felt in his molars — and reared, its left legs buckling where the cut had severed the connective tissue between its second and third segments.

Two of the remaining three Striders charged. Not at Maren — at the sound of the scream. They were not coordinating. They were reacting, each one moving toward the noise, and the noise was everywhere now: Maren's axe biting chitin, the lead Strider's scream, Pella's arrow thudding into the second creature's thorax with a sound like a fist hitting leather.

Pella fired again. The arrow caught the third Strider in a leg joint, and the limb buckled, but the creature did not slow. It kept coming, dragging its damaged body across the stone with a speed that should have been impossible, mandibles opening and closing, reaching for—

Fell's spear caught it through the underside of the head wedge. The metal point drove between the mandible plates and into soft tissue beneath. The Strider convulsed, legs scraping the stone in wild arcs, and Fell twisted the spear and pulled, and the creature's head came apart in a spray of dark fluid.

Kael stood against the wall. He had not moved. He could not have moved. His legs were locked, his muscles frozen not by fear but by something deeper — a recognition so complete it bypassed conscious thought. The smell was the same. The clicking was the same. The spray of dark fluid across the stone was the same, and the sound of chitin splitting was the same, and the keening scream was the same, and he was eleven years old again, sealed in a cellar, listening to his world die.

The fight lasted ninety seconds.

Maren killed the lead Strider with a downward chop that split its head wedge clean in half. Pella killed the second with three arrows in rapid succession, each one finding the same joint gap where chitin plates overlapped — a pattern she had read from the first kill and applied to the others. Fell held the line against the third until Maren could flank it.

The fourth Strider turned to run. Maren threw the axe. It spun once and buried itself in the creature's hindquarters. The Strider staggered, dragged itself ten paces, and collapsed.

Silence. Then the dripping of dark fluid on stone.

Maren retrieved her axe from the fourth Strider's corpse. When she pulled it free, her prosthetic arm made a sound — a grinding, grating note that did not match the clean motion of the rest of the limb. She paused, flexed the fingers, flexed them again. The Echo Shard lattice along the forearm flickered once, then steadied.

She looked at the arm. The outer shell of the prosthetic — the Tower bone casing that protected the internal lattice — had a new scar: a deep gouge running from wrist to elbow, where one of the charging Striders had caught her during the flank. The bone was cracked but not broken. The lattice beneath was intact. But the gouge had compromised the casing's structural integrity, and in a fight, compromised casing meant compromised leverage.

"Stone's still holding," she said, more to herself than to anyone. She flexed the arm again. The grinding note was quieter now, but present.

Fell was already at her side, examining the gouge with clinical fingers. "Casing is cracked along sixty percent of the forearm length. The Shard lattice is undamaged, but the structural wrap is compromised. You lose another ten percent and the arm won't take lateral load."

"I know what it means."

"Then let me—"

"I said I know." She pulled her arm away from Fell's examination. Not rough, not angry. Final. A door closing. "We deal with it at the rest area. Not now."

She turned to Kael.

He was still against the wall. His hands had stopped shaking, but his jaw was still locked, and he realized his nails had dug crescents into his palms — four small points of pain that he had not felt during the fight. He looked at the dead Striders scattered across the corridor. Dark fluid pooled around their segmented bodies. The closest one — the one Fell had killed — had its mandibles frozen open, layers of interlocking plates visible in the dim light. He could see the structure clearly now: the way the plates were arranged, the way the sensory organs were embedded in the mandible walls, the way the legs connected to the body at joints that should not have been flexible enough to support the creature's weight.

He knew this anatomy. He had seen it in the wreckage of Ashwick — the creature had left pieces of itself behind when it moved on. Shards of chitin embedded in doorframes. Claw marks on the root cellar door. He had studied those remnants with a scholar's obsessive eye, trying to understand what had killed his village, and the Tower Studies Commission researcher had told him what it was, and now here was the whole thing, dead on the floor, and the knowledge sat in his stomach like a stone.

"There are death echoes," he said. His voice was flat. "From the kills. I can read them. Learn their patterns — how they patrol, where they cluster, what triggers an attack response. If we're going deeper—"

"Absolutely not." Fell's voice was sharp. "You're still recovering from the Floor 2 reading. The interval between readings—"

"Is a luxury we might not have." Kael looked at the Striders. "These are the creatures that destroyed Ashwick. One of them left this floor — got out somehow, walked twenty leagues, and killed an entire village. If one got out, more can get out. If more get out—"

"I said no." Fell stepped between Kael and the nearest corpse. "You're not reading anything for twelve hours. Minimum. The neurological damage from the last reading hasn't stabilized. You push another reading into that, you risk cascading failure."

Kael looked at Fell. Then at Maren.

She was watching him with that expression — the one that was not sympathy and not cruelty but the space between, the place where practicality lived. She had lost her arm on Floor 12. She had been running the Tower for three years. She had seen people die from less than what he was risking, and she had seen people survive more.

"The information could save us," Kael said to her.

"Everything you do costs us," Maren replied. "So make the calculation. Is the intel from one Strider echo worth twelve hours of you being dead weight while Fell pumps you full of tonics? Can you afford that delay on Floor 3?"

"I don't know. But I know I've been fighting these things since I was eleven years old, and I was fighting them blind. I will not fight them blind again."

Something shifted in Maren's expression. Not softening — Maren did not soften. But a change in the architecture of her face, a rearrangement of angles that suggested she was seeing something she had not expected to see. Not the tactical asset she had recruited. Not the scholar with the strange ability. Something else.

"One echo," she said. "Fell monitors the entire time. Any sign of seizure or cascading symptoms, he pulls you out. You get what you get, and you don't push for more."

"One echo."

"Done." She turned to Fell. "Let him read."

Fell looked at Maren the way a man looks at someone who has just made a bet he knows will lose. But he stepped aside.

Kael knelt beside the third Strider — the one Fell had killed with the spear. The creature's body was cooling, the chitin dulling from dark bronze to a flat black. The wound in its head gaped open, mandible plates splayed. Kael placed his hands on the body.

The pull was different from the human echoes. Sharper. Less emotional, more sensory — the Strider's death had not carried grief or confusion or regret. It had carried sensation: the impact of Fell's spear, the disruption of its mandible structure, a cascade of sensory input from six legs reporting simultaneously that the body they were attached to was failing. The Strider had not understood death. It had registered damage, registered the failure of systems, and stopped. The echo was a recording of biological shutdown, not a farewell.

But it was an echo nonetheless. And beneath the shutdown data, layered beneath the final moments, was the creature's life.

Kael sank into it.

The Strider had lived on Floor 3. Born here — not born, exactly, but assembled, the way the Tower assembled everything, its body forming from the bioluminescent stone over a period of days, chitin hardening, legs extending, sensory systems calibrating. It had emerged into the dark corridors and joined others of its kind in the patrol pattern that was not learned but inherent, written into the creature's architecture the way the double-layer walls were written into the floor's architecture.

It patrolled. It ate — the Tower's ambient energy, supplemented by anything organic that entered its territory. It fought others of its kind for position, for territory, for access to the richer feeding zones near the center of the floor. The clicking was communication, not echo-location — a territorial signal, a way of saying this is mine, stay away, repeated endlessly through the dark.

And then — there.

In the middle of the creature's life, in the center of the echo's timeline, a gap.

Not a gap in the creature's memory. A gap in the echo itself. A section where the data should have been — should have continued the patrol, continued the feeding, continued the unremarkable existence of an organism born to kill and die inside a stone labyrinth — but instead was absent. Not dark. Not corrupted in the way a file corrupts, with garbled fragments and broken edges. Absent. Cleanly removed, like a page torn from a book, leaving only the edges of what came before and what came after.

Kael had felt this before.

The Floor 1 echo — the dead man who had triggered the wall trap — had carried the same gap. The same clean absence. A section of his dying thoughts, his final seconds, had been removed with the same precision: not destroyed but deleted, leaving a shaped hole in the data that Kael could feel the edges of but not fill.

He had not understood it then. He had been too overwhelmed by the physical shock of the first reading to analyze the data architecture. But now, with two echoes to compare, the pattern was unmistakable.

The gap in the Strider's echo was in the same structural position as the gap in the dead man's echo. Not the same content — the Strider's gap contained patrol data while the man's gap contained dying thoughts — but the same shape. The same surgical precision. The same absence that was not random but deliberate, as if something had reached into the echo and removed a specific section for a specific reason.

Something was editing these deaths.

Kael released the echo. The cold stone of Floor 3 returned to his hands. His nose was bleeding — not heavily, but steadily, a thin line of red dripping from his nostril to the dark floor. The clicking in his ears was layered: the phantom shrieker click from Floor 2, the real Strider click from the corridor, and beneath both, the flat, empty silence of the gap.

"What did you get?" Maren asked. She had moved to stand over him, axe in hand, watching the corridor while he read.

"They're native to this floor. Born here — or assembled here. They patrol in established territories, feed on ambient Tower energy, and communicate through vibration. Standard ecology. Nothing that explains how one got out." He wiped his nose with his sleeve. "But there's something else. The echo has a gap — a section that's been removed. Not corrupted, not damaged. Removed. Cleanly. The same kind of gap I found in the Floor 1 echo."

Maren's expression did not change. But her grip on the axe handle tightened.

"Same pattern?"

"Same pattern. Same structural position. Two different deaths, two different floors, two different species — but the same shaped hole in the data. Whatever is doing this isn't hitting random targets. It's editing specific sections of specific echoes."

"Why?"

"I don't know. But the section that's missing from the Strider's echo — the patrol data from roughly the middle of its life — that's the section that would contain any unusual activity. Any deviation from normal patrol behavior. If something happened to this Strider, if it was directed somewhere or drawn somewhere, that data would be in the section that's been removed."

"The section that's gone."

"The section that's gone."

Fell said nothing. Pella said nothing. Maren looked at the dead Striders, then at Kael, then at the corridor that stretched deeper into Floor 3, its walls carved with fresh scratch marks and lit by the pulse of bioluminescent veins.

"Someone is hiding something," Maren said. "Not someone. Something. Something inside this place is cutting holes in the dead."

She did not elaborate. She did not need to. The statement hung in the warm, mineral-scented air like a judgment.

---

They found a defensible alcove two hundred paces from the kill site — a recessed chamber with a single entrance, high walls, and a ceiling low enough that Pella could brace her bow against it if anything came through the door. Maren posted Pella at the entrance and Fell at the chamber's center, where his medical supplies were spread in organized rows. Kael sat with his back against the far wall, pressing a cloth to his nose.

The nosebleed had slowed to a trickle. His head throbbed with the particular ache that Fell had called "integration pain" — the sensation of foreign data settling into neural pathways that had not been built to hold it. Two echoes in two days. The Floor 2 shrieker swarm and the Floor 3 Strider patrol. Two deaths, two ecosystems, two shaped absences in the data. The cumulative weight of it sat behind his eyes like a pressure, not quite pain, not quite anything he could name.

The party ate in silence. Hardtack and dried meat, the Tower's staple provisions. The water was warm from the ambient heat of the floor. Kael chewed mechanically, tasting dust and salt and the ghost residue of the Strider's sensory input — a flavor profile that was not his, not human, not anything he wanted in his mouth but was there regardless.

Maren ate across the chamber from him, sitting on a raised stone ledge with her prosthetic arm extended, examining the gouge in the casing. The damage was more visible in the alcove's ambient light: a ragged furrow in the pale Tower bone, running the full length of the forearm. Beneath the cracked casing, the Echo Shard lattice glowed faintly — still functional, but exposed where the bone had split.

Fell had wanted to wrap the arm. Maren had refused.

Now she sat and looked at it, flexing the fingers, rotating the wrist, testing each joint's range of motion with the methodical attention of someone who had done this many times before. The grinding note was still there — a faint, metal-on-stone sound that accompanied lateral movement and disappeared during flexion.

"It'll hold," Fell said from across the chamber. He did not look up from his supplies. "But not for long. Another impact on that casing and the lattice shifts. If the lattice shifts, the feedback loop breaks, and the arm stops responding to your nerve signals."

"I know."

"You need to let me reinforce it. I have Shard paste in my pack. It won't fix the casing, but it'll stabilize the lattice—"

"I said it'll hold."

Silence. Fell returned to his supplies. Kael watched Maren's face — the set of her jaw, the stillness around her eyes, the way she looked at the prosthetic arm not as a tool but as a problem she had already calculated the solution for and chosen not to execute. Not because she was stubborn. Because executing the solution required admitting the problem was worse than she wanted anyone to know.

She caught him looking.

"You're staring."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be observant." She held the arm out, rotating the wrist so the damage was visible. "This arm is Tower bone. Grown, not carved — the lattice inside it is Echo Shard, woven during the growth process so it bonds with the bone at a structural level. When it works, it's stronger than anything human hands can build. When it breaks—" She flexed the fingers. The grinding note sounded. "When it breaks, it breaks in ways that can't be repaired with normal tools."

"Where did you get it?"

"Floor 12."

He waited. She did not continue. The silence stretched, and Kael understood that what came next was not information she was offering freely but something he was being allowed to see — a door that had been opened a crack, not all the way.

"How long ago?" he asked.

"Three years. First cycle I ran. Made it to Floor 12 in eight months — fast by any standard. I was twenty-four. Thought I was invincible." She looked at the arm. "Floor 12 has a creature type that doesn't appear in any guild bestiary. Something that hadn't been cataloged. It took my arm. The bone grew back — the Tower does that, if you survive long enough in its presence. But the arm that grew back was not the arm I lost. It was Tower bone, shaped by the Tower's logic, not mine. I've been carrying a piece of this place inside my body ever since."

"That's why you run the floors."

"That's one reason." She lowered the arm. "The other reason is simpler. There's nothing outside for me to go back to."

She said it without inflection. Not sad, not hard — just flat, the way you state a fact about weather or distance. The alcove was very quiet. Pella stood at the entrance, her back to the party, watching the corridor. She did not turn around. Fell's hands paused over his supplies, then resumed their work.

Kael understood the weight of what she had said. He understood it because he lived inside it — the specific gravity of having nothing, of being the only one left, of carrying a grief so total that the absence of what you lost became the most present thing in your life.

"Nothing," he repeated.

"Parents dead before I could walk. Raised in a guild ward — the Collective takes in orphans, trains them, sends them into the Tower. I was a product. Functional, expendable, efficient. I ran floors because that was what I was built for. When the arm came off on Floor 12, the Collective marked me as a loss. Decommissioned my position. Gave it to someone else." She looked at him. "The Tower doesn't care if I come back. The Collective doesn't care if I come back. There are no people waiting for me outside this gate."

"But you're still here."

"Because the Tower is the only place that makes sense to me. The corridors, the floors, the logic of it — it's the only home I've ever had. And if I'm going to die, I'd rather die climbing than standing still."

She looked at her arm one more time. Then she let it drop to her side, the damaged prosthetic hanging with a stillness that was different from before — heavier, more deliberate, as if the arm had shifted from a tool she wielded to a weight she carried.

"You're not like the others I've run with," she said. "They read the Tower for profit. For shards, for reputation, for the guild's attention. You read it for something else."

"For my sister."

"For your sister." She nodded. "That's a worse reason. Harder to walk away from. Profit has a ceiling. Grief doesn't."

Kael looked at the dark stone floor, the bioluminescent veins pulsing in their slow, organic rhythm. He thought about Ashwick. About Mira's charcoal drawing. About the clicking that had followed him from Floor 2 to Floor 3 and now sat in his memory permanently, layered over the real thing, the two sounds indistinguishable.

"One of them got out," he said. "One of the Striders left this floor and walked to my village. That's not supposed to happen. Creatures are bound to their floors. Everyone knows that. But it happened, and no one knows why."

"I know it happened," Maren said. "I've heard the story. Every floor runner has. The Ashwick anomaly — a Floor 3 creature outside the Tower. It's the reason the Commission sent a researcher."

"The researcher — Ellowen — she didn't have answers. She documented the creature's path, measured the damage, took samples. But she couldn't explain how it left."

Maren was quiet for a moment. "There are things about the Tower that the guilds know and don't share. Routes that shift without warning. Creatures that appear on the wrong floors. Deaths that don't match any pattern. Three years of running, and I've seen enough to know that the Tower's rules are not as fixed as the books say."

"The corruption," Kael said. "The gaps in the echoes. Someone is editing—"

"Something," Maren corrected. "Not someone. I've never seen anything human inside the Tower that could do what those gaps suggest. This is the Tower's own logic breaking down. Or being broken." She stood, stretching, her prosthetic arm clicking softly as the joints resettled. "We sleep in shifts. Two hours each. I take first watch. You sleep."

"I can—"

"You can sleep. That's what you can do. Your brain just absorbed two alien deaths and you're bleeding from the nose. Sleep."

He wanted to argue. But the weight of the readings pressed down on him — the Strider's mechanical shutdown, the clean absence of the gap, the dead woman's clicking, the dead man's confusion — all of it layered together in a burden that his body was only now beginning to feel. His eyes burned. His hands trembled. The alcove's warm stone pulled at him with a gravity that had nothing to do with the Tower's power and everything to do with exhaustion.

He slept.

He dreamed of clicking. Not the shriekers' click or the Striders' click, but a third sound — a precise, deliberate rhythm, like a pen writing on paper. Like words being removed. Like a record being edited, page by page, death by death, until nothing remained but the gaps.