November 22, 2025
I. Fifth Floor: The Riddle of Doors
We emerged into a long gallery that stretched before us. At the chamber’s center-right stood a solitary door, ancient oak bound with black iron, the number 7 etched deep into its face as though carved by a dagger of obsidian. To our left, stretching away into dimness, six additional doors stood in silent procession—numbered 1 through 6.
Ender stroked his magnificent beard—that great cascade of dwarven hair that served as thinking apparatus. “A puzzle,” he rumbled. The paladin approached door number 1 with the deliberate caution of a man who has learned that doors in magical towers are rarely merely doors. He pushed through—and emerged, to our collective bafflement, from the same door he had entered. Crow, ever the observer, let his sharp elven eyes travel from door to door, from number to number. “Seven,” he said at last. “The number seven must be significant.” He proposed an experiment—Ender should once more brave door number 1, but this time with precise timing. The ranger would move swiftly down the hallway, counting paces, and enter door number 6 simultaneously with Ender’s passage through door 1. I confess I expected nothing. Perhaps a flash of light. Perhaps nothing at all. Instead—
Vanished.
Both of them, swallowed by the architecture as completely as if the floor had opened beneath their feet. I stood alone in that long chamber, my footsteps echoing against stone that suddenly seemed indifferent to my presence. The silence pressed upon me with physical weight. I was alone. Truly alone. And then, the spiral of thoughts that Aelfric of Ulek knows all too well began its familiar descent. Abandoned, whispered the voice of insecurity that has been my companion since childhood. They have found the treasure and left you to rot in this forsaken corridor.
“Sorry it took us so long,” a voice rumbled behind me. Ender tumbled from door number 1, his armor clattering against the stone. Simultaneously, Crow emerged from door number 6, the synchronicity of their arrival suggesting they had indeed traveled somewhere—somewhen—together. “I was never the best at arithmetic,” the dwarf admitted, brushing dust from his pauldrons with excessive thoroughness, as though embarrassed by his mathematical deficiency. “Doors 1, 2, and 4!” Crow called out with that infuriating grin of his—the expression that suggested he found the universe’s cruelties privately amusing. “One plus six equals seven. Simple enough, once you see it.”
II. Sixth Floor: The Battlefield
The sixth floor announced itself with the stench of ancient violence. The chamber we entered was no room at all, but a battlefield. Skeletons lay scattered across the stone like dice thrown by a giant’s hand, their bones bleached to the color of old ivory, their weapons reduced to rusted iron that crumbled at the touch. The air tasted of copper and dust, that peculiar flavor that lingers where death has been busy.
Crow moved among the fallen with the professional interest of a man who has catalogued many deaths. He knelt beside one skeletal warrior, his fingers tracing the pattern of decay with clinical detachment. “Superbly decayed,” he observed, as one might comment upon wine. “Rusted weapons. These have lain here for centuries—perhaps longer.”
Across the chamber, I could see our goal: a door set into the far wall, promising escape from this charnel house. Between us and salvation stood a plinth of black stone, and above it—hovering impossibly in defiance of gravity—a golden key that caught what little light existed and threw it back in defiance. Crow’s eyes gleamed with that particular acquisitiveness that defines adventurers of our ilk. Without consultation, without the caution that wisdom might suggest, he swung himself onto the plinth with the athletic grace that only elves seem to possess. His fingers closed around the key—
KABOOM!
The explosion knocked me from my feet, sent me sprawling across bone and rusted metal. The plinth shattered with a sound like the world cracking open, stone fragments scattering like shrapnel. I covered my head, felt debris rain against my arms and back, tasted dust thick as porridge in my mouth. When the ringing in my ears subsided, when the falling stone had settled and the dust began its slow descent back to earth, I looked up and beheld horror.
It floated toward us—a sphere of pale flesh the color of things found in deep caves, things that have never known sunlight. Ten eyestalks sprouted from its body like the appendages of some obscene flower, each terminating in an eye that rotated with mechanical precision, scanning, searching, hunting. The central eye, massive and unblinking, fixed upon us with an intelligence that was worse than mere hunger—it was curiosity. A beholder-kin. Smaller than the legends describe, but no less terrible for its reduced size.
“Run,” I whispered, but my voice had abandoned me. “Run,” I tried again, and this time the word emerged as barely a croak. My mind raced through possibilities, through spells and strategies, through the accumulated knowledge of a hundred forgotten tomes. The creature’s eyes—each one a weapon, each one capable of unleashing horrors upon our flesh. We could not fight it. We could not outrun it. We needed… distraction.
I reached for my magic, for the illusions that are a bard’s stock in trade, and fashioned something from the chaotic depths of my subconscious. What drives a beholder? What motivates a creature of pure chaos and alien intellect? I thought of tentacles, of sensation, of desires that humanoid minds could not comprehend—and shaped them into form. What manifested above the beholder-kin was… best not described in polite company. A ruby-red mass of squirming appendages, of stockings and garter belts that suggested appetites I had not known I possessed until that moment of creative desperation. The creature turned its central eye upon the illusion, and I could have sworn—though beholders possess no features capable of expression—I could have sworn it purred.
“Go!” I hissed at Crow, the stealthiest among us. “The door! Now!” The ranger needed no encouragement. He leaped over scattered remains, his boots crunching against ancient bone, while Ender and I scrambled after. We ran as the beholder-kin drifted toward my illusion, its eyestalks quivering with what I desperately hoped was ardor rather than suspicion.
The high-pitched shriek told us the deception had lasted precisely as long as required. Behind us, beams of energy—sickly green, deathly grey—cut through the space we had occupied moments before. I felt the brush of enervation against my soul, the whisper of paralysis against my nerves. We dove through the door as one, a tangle of limbs and terror, and collapsed upon the floor beyond.
III. Seventh Floor: Pastoral Deception
The transition could not have been more complete. Where before we had known war and death and the screaming of eldritch horrors, now we found ourselves in… a meadow. A pasture. The sun—impossible sun, for we had climbed into a tower—hung low in a sky of deepening azure, painting the clouds with strokes of rose and gold. Around us, sheep grazed upon grass so green it seemed painted by a romantic’s hand, their wool white as fresh snow, their movements peaceful as dreams.
The air smelled of clover and earth, of the clean scent that follows rain. A breeze carried the distant sound of… bells? Music? Something pastoral and soothing.
I stood blinking, certain that the beholder had struck me with more than its eye-beams, that I wandered now in some hallucination born of trauma. But Ender and Crow seemed equally perplexed, their weapons lowered in the face of such aggressive tranquility.
Then I noticed the Z’s carved into the grass throughout the meadow—great letter Z’s, as tall as a halfling, their edges crisp and impossible. At the center of this impossible pastoral, a campfire crackled merrily, though no wood fed its flames, and no smoke rose from its burning.
“It’s a puzzle,” Ender announced, his hand finding his beard with the automatic gesture of a man seeking wisdom in follicles. Crow examined the ground as though tracking prey, his elven eyes searching for signs of passage, of disturbance, of meaning in the pattern of crushed grass. I stood stumped—quite literally, for I felt my mouth hanging open like a village idiot’s.
Then, from the corner of my vision, I caught it: Ender’s finger, wagging in the air with the rhythmic motion of counting. One. Two. Three. His lips moved silently, his eyes tracking the sheep that grazed nearby.
Of course. “Counting sheep,” I breathed, the revelation washing over me like cool water. “The Zzzzz’s—the snoring! The fire—we’re meant to sleep!”
My companions turned to me with expressions ranging from Crow’s skeptical arch of eyebrow to Ender’s considering nod. But what else could it be? The pastoral setting, the hour of dusk, the impossible Z’s carved into dreaming grass?
We unrolled our bedrolls upon the soft turf—suspicious of every blade, but too exhausted to resist the logic. The campfire warmed faces still chilled from the icy floor below. I lay back, stared at a sky that darkened with unnatural speed, and… opened my eyes to heat.
IV. Eighth Floor: The Gibbering Depths
The transition was instantaneous, unsettling, wrong in ways that made my stomach lurch. We stood now in a square chamber, the walls radiating warmth like a baker’s oven, the air shimmering with thermal distortion. The eighth floor was an assault upon the senses and the sanity.
We stood upon a wide platform that ran around the chamber’s perimeter like a ledge circling an abyss. Below us, chains—heavy iron links thick as my arm—dangled down into a lower level where stone walkways cut precarious paths through beds of glowing coals. The heat was physical, pressing against my face, drawing sweat that immediately evaporated, leaving salt crust upon my skin. The air stank of sulfur and burning stone.
“Gibbering mouthers,” Crow warned, his voice dropping to that urgent whisper that all adventurers recognize. “Keep your distance. Their babbling—” But they were already upon us.
They emerged from the shadows beneath the platform, from crevices in the stone, from the very air itself it seemed—amorphous horrors of flesh and mouth and eye. Their bodies were wrong, composed of protuberances and orifices that shifted and flowed like mud stirred by unseen hands. And the sounds they made…
The gibbering hit us like a physical blow—not merely noise, but assault upon the mind itself. The mouthers’ incoherent babbling wormed into consciousness, disrupting thought, unstringing the carefully woven fabric of reason. I felt my own thoughts scattering like startled birds, grasping at coherence and finding only chaos.
Crow struck first—a dreadful blow that should have ended any natural creature. But the mouther merely… laughed. Its babbling intensified, and the ranger’s face went slack, his eyes unfocusing. He stumbled backward, gibberish spilling from his own lips, and tumbled over the platform’s edge with a cry that was almost comical in its suddenness. I heard the impact below—the grunt of breath expelled, the clatter of armor against stone. Crow, I thought, but could not form the concern into words.
Ender fought beside me, his warpick rising and falling with the methodical rhythm of a dwarven craftsman at his forge. But the mouther’s assault was not physical. The paladin staggered, his beard quivering with effort as he fought the invasive nonsense that sought to colonize his mind. He shook his head, cleared his thoughts—and another wave of gibberish struck him down. He fell like a great tree, prone upon the platform as the mouthers slithered closer.
Things were not looking good.
I reached for my magic, sought a spell that might turn the tide. Tasha’s Hideous Laughter—a charm to overwhelm the mind with mirth. I cast it upon the nearest mouther, felt the magic spiral toward its target… and fizzle. The creature was too stupid—too fundamentally alien—to comprehend humor. It simply was, in the way that storms are, or earthquakes.
I summoned instead a cloud of daggers—shimmering blades of force that hovered above the battlefield. But as I prepared to release them, the ground beneath my feet shifted. Turned doughlike, yielding, treacherous. I sank to my knees, stuck fast in terrain that had betrayed us, confusion overwhelming my ability to process what was happening.
From below, I heard movement. Crow—climbing back up the chains, his elven agility serving where his mind had failed. He emerged over the platform’s edge, loosing arrows with desperate speed, keeping his distance from the mouthers’ maddening influence.
Ender recovered his wits, shook off the lingering effects of the gibbering, and heaved his warpick into the side of the nearest aberration. It dissolved—not died, but unmade—becoming a slowly spreading puddle of ooze that steamed against the hot stone.
My cloud of daggers found their mark, shredding another mouther into twitching fragments. Ender, with that practical dwarven ingenuity that I have come to admire, employed his immovable rod to lever the final creature over the platform’s edge. It fell screaming onto the coals below, where it bubbled and popped like fat upon a griddle.
We stood panting, battered, our sanity frayed at the edges. Before us, across a ten-foot gap that yawned like a challenge, stood a door—our exit, our salvation.
Ender studied the gap with the calculating expression of a man examining a difficult engineering problem. Then his eyes found me, and a grin spread across his bearded face that I did not trust. “The safest method,” he announced, “is to throw Aelfric.”
“I protest!” I declared, with what dignity I could muster. I was overruled. Two against one—a recurring theme in our democracy.
Ender’s hands closed around my waist—rough, calloused hands that smelled of metal and honest sweat. He lifted me with dwarven strength that made my objections seem as significant as a mosquito’s buzz. And then, with a grunt of effort and a grin of pure dwarven mischief, he hurled me.
I flew. Briefly. Arms windmilling, cloak streaming behind like a battle banner of dubious honor, I crossed the gap and landed upon the far platform with a grace that surprised us all. I rolled, came to my feet, and found myself whole—if thoroughly indignant.
“The indignity!” I called back, brushing dust from my sleeves with exaggerated dignity.
The immovable rod followed—thrown with a rope attached—and Crow shimmied across with the casual ease of his kind. Ender simply jumped, his armor clanking as he landed with a thud that shook the stone.
Beyond the door lay a wide chamber, five portals stretching along the left wall like choices in some infernal lottery.
V. Ninth Floor: Mimicry
The ninth floor presented itself as a simple corridor-deceptively so, I should have known.
Between the five doors, four torches burned with flames of impossible colors: one yellow as jaundice, one red as arterial blood, one blue as a winter sky, one white as funeral shrouds. Their light cast conflicting shadows that danced against stone walls, creating patterns that shifted when viewed askance.
On the far side of the room stood our next challenge: an enormous skeleton, twenty feet tall at least, its bones yellowed with age but still articulate, still posed in attitudes of violence. A hill giant, I surmised, or something similar-long dead, preserved by the tower’s strange magic.
Crow approached with the caution of a cat investigating a snake. He circled the bones, tested them with gentle prods, examined the empty eye sockets for signs of animation. “Non-magical,” he reported at last, with a shrug that suggested disappointment. “No weapons. Probably a hill giant. Just… scenery.”
While he examined the skeleton, I turned my attention to the yellow torch. It burned with a sorcerous light-cold, producing illumination without heat, resistant to my attempts to extinguish it. Magic, certainly, but of what purpose?
Ender, meanwhile, had approached one of the doors. He reached for the handle-
SNAP!
The door moved, surged forward, revealed itself as something far more terrible than mere wood and iron. Tentacles erupted from its surface-pseudopods of flesh that glistened with moisture and grasped with hungry intent. They wrapped around Ender’s armored form, lifted him from his feet, drew him toward a maw that opened where a keyhole should have been.
“Mimic!” Crow shouted, his bow already in hand.
I tried mocking it-my wit my only weapon when magic seemed insufficient. “Fancy yourself immortal? We’ll see how long that lasts!” The creature ignored me, which seemed excessive given the quality of the barb.
Ender took his vow of enmity-that ancient paladin’s calling that marks a foe for destruction-and struck with his warpick. The weapon crashed into pseudoflesh, drawing ichor that smelled of rot and fermentation. Crow’s arrows followed, peppering the thing’s door-like surface.
I drew my crossbow, aimed with care, and fired.
The bolt went wide-struck not the mimic that held Ender, but the next door along the wall. Which also animated. Which also revealed itself as a predator in architectural disguise.
“Your body’s a temple!” I shouted at the second mimic, inspiration striking through desperation. “To an idiot god!”
This barb found its mark-not physically, but psychologically. The creature hesitated, its attack faltering, and in that moment of confusion, Ender and Crow finished their work upon the first. It collapsed into a steaming heap of dissolving flesh.
The second mimic, wounded by words if not by weapons, shape-shifted before our eyes-becoming not a door, but a treasure chest, complete with protruding tongue that lolled obscenely.
“Disgusting,” I observed, and meant it.
Crow fired an arrow at the first door-the original door, the one that had started this chaos. It struck wood with a satisfying thunk, and remained there, quivering. No mimic. A real door, then, or at least not a hungry one.
We walked through into whatever waited beyond, battered, wiser, and somewhat sticky.
The tower, it seemed, was nowhere near finished with us.