A Jaded Life

There was something poetic about the way my new construction rose from the field of stone and rubble. Slowly, step by step, the devastation was pushed back and the chaos was turned into something orderly as I used the quarried rocks one after another.

At first, I simply prepared the foundations, letting some of the new rock push away the soil covering the stone beneath, fusing these new rocks into the old bedrock to create a solid foundation for the tower I was planning to build. Parts of the shape were solely inspired by the Frozen Citadel, though there were clear differences, but I was planning to add some of the ideas Lia and Luna had proposed. Sure, it wouldn’t be the pure, open Greek design Luna had imagined, at least not for most of the tower, but there would be a few open parts, allowing rituals that needed to be performed under the open sky, just as there would be a massive library that could serve as a Shrine to Lady Hecate, too. For Lia, I was happily adding some gothic influences to the design, even a couple of stone statues to enchant so they would act as guardians if I could get that to work. I might be unable to, but I was certainly planning to try.

Lastly, even if it was among the first things I had to construct, was the underground area for Alex. It wouldn’t be a real cave, but it would be fairly close, especially as I was planning to connect the eventual basement to the cave I had dug into the cliffs as a temporary shelter. This way, Alex had their preferred environment while the rest of us were able to live in a comfortable building. Well, it would hopefully be a comfortable building. For now, it was merely an idea floating through my mind and a bunch of rocks that I slowly transformed so they would realise their potential.

Once the foundation was placed, I had to create the core of the tower. The core itself was fairly simple, nothing but a thick pillar of solid rock, interlaced with veins of crystal. It rose into the sky for some forty metres, jutting just above the cliffs of the quarry and ending up a little below the trees growing on the hills above it. The idea was that our line of sight, once the entire tower was finished, would be above the treetops, allowing us to see far into the distance. That way, we’d be able to observe the distant town and even the plains beyond, though observations in the other direction would be a lot more difficult thanks to the rolling, mountainous terrain there.

With the planned height of the tower, I realised I needed something to keep the base stable and stave off the force of wind leveraging against its height. Even now, with just the central pillar, I could feel the wind try to push it over, its length working against it. I needed something to stabilise the entire construction, something to absorb the forces caused by high winds.

Suppose I had better materials, something like steel or similar metals. In that case, I might have been able to have the actual walls of the tower absorb these forces, or maybe build some sort of steel support structure into the tower to take care of them, similar to the way actual skyscrapers had done so, but I didn’t have the right materials. Sure, I could alter stone with my magic, in particular Earth and Crystal, making it a little more malleable but there were limits. For a small building, the altered stones were enough but to build a decently high tower, I needed something else. There might be a way to use different materials, but I couldn’t come up with a good one, at least not without tremendous effort in trying to look for the right metals and slowly refine them together with Alex. There were possibilities in Crystal, Earth and Fire Magic, especially if we combined them with Alchemy, but it would require a reinvention of metallurgy on a level that would likely take months, maybe years.

Because of that, I added a set of four stabilisers around the central core, solid walls that jutted outwards like the spokes of a wheel, one in each cardinal direction. The idea was to have these four stabilising walls rise up to a height of about thirty metres and slope down to the ground at an angle, allowing them to absorb the forces working on the top of the tower a lot easier than normally possible. The slopes were similar in angle to that found on a mountain of sand, or the great pyramids for that matter, too steep to easily climb but just right to absorb the incoming forces.

I considered whether I should make these walls into something more, something akin to the wings of a building, allowing each of my companions their own space but I soon decided against it. The tower itself had enough space to let each of us set up individual working areas, so building out the spokes was simply unneeded. No, they would be thick enough to absorb the forces they were meant to take and otherwise, they’d be solid rock. Maybe with an escape tunnel or something, I would have to consider that idea. Having additional, magically secured exits sounded like a prudent thing to have.

With the skeleton of the tower, the central pillar and the four spokes jutting out from it, done, I could start on the actual building. As things were, we still had to live in the temporary cave I had dug out, not terribly comfortable as the weather was getting nastier by the day. By now, I had been forced to carefully enchant Luna’s clothes and sleeping bag with Fire Magic, so she could be warm and cosy, even with the horrible weather. Even Alex, Silva and Lia were feeling the cold, and two of them weren’t even completely alive any longer. And yet, they still felt the chill.

Luckily, I was able to use Fire Magic, something I hadn’t been able to wield on Mundus, and practising to enchant their stuff actually gave me two points in my Fire Rune Mastery, bringing the skill to level seventeen. Similarly, Enchanting went up by a point, reaching thirty, but those were only two of the various skill-gains I received during the construction of the tower, to say nothing of the weeks before. Sure, I hadn’t been able to do a lot of experimenting while travelling, especially not the kind of experiment Lia was interested in, but Luna and I had performed the occasional experiment, creating new magical creatures and plants, while trying to further our understanding of magic and how it interacted with basic biology. A part of me was saddened that I wouldn’t be able to watch these new creations grow, maybe even thrive, but there was just no time to sit and watch.

Maybe now, with the tower I was building, I would be able to take my time and study how a few of these creatures developed after their initial creation. Not for a significant time, at least not when judged against the usual life-span of them, to say nothing about their reproductive cycles, but it would give me an initial idea. More would have to wait until after I had managed to get my Sigmir back and we had found a place to call home.

But first, I had to turn the skeleton of my tower into an actual building. Walls started to rise quite quickly, connecting the spokes jutting out from the central column to form a circular floor plan and on top of these walls, I could soon set the different levels of the tower, for each of them held up by a few columns within the rooms that they formed. It wasn’t fancy, not yet, but it was nicely done, at least in my opinion.

Each floor was some four metres high, giving us ten floors with four relatively large rooms each, as separated by the spokes. The top of the tower would, later, serve as both an observatory for the surrounding land and ritual space, maybe even a place of worship for Lady Hecate, but it would depend on Her wishes. I was planning to add Shrine to the tower but the details would depend on the Lady.

However, the idea to set up a shrine in the tower came with one fairly massive downside. A shrine, if it was supposed to be used as a place of worship, needed to be accessible. Not just for Luna and myself but for anyone who might be interested in worshipping Lady Hecate, anyone She might call to Her shrine.

But I didn’t want to have just anyone casually trudge through my tower, even if it was fairly unlikely that there’d be worshippers in the next few months. I didn’t want to take that risk, so I decided there’d be a separation between an open section of the tower, which could be used for the Shrine and maybe even to access the roof, and a closed section. The closed section would be hidden and only accessible to the five of us, though I wasn’t sure how exactly I could make it that way.

Still, it was something to think about as I was forming the walls and floors out of rock, our tower growing steadily as I did.