I kept moving to the doorway that led down to the cellar. We had never gotten another door for it but I dragged a chair and propped it between the archway. It was enough to know if someone climbed up and moved it while I had to go around and search everywhere. I didn’t want Tower to be moving around at the same time and for us to keep missing each other. It was unlikely but even at that point I was already grasping at any possibility.
I searched outside at first. I was terrified of accidentally tumbling off the stone foundation and away from the tower. It was ridiculous to think I could fall far enough to get out of range of whatever hid the tower from sight but I wasn’t thinking clearly.
I did a quick circuit around the tower’s base and then another one. I did a third and final patrol at a much slower pace, staring at the earth around the stone for any sign of footprints. There were none, but it was the middle of summer and the soil was mostly dry. I couldn’t rule out whether he had left or not.
When I was back in the tower I noted that the chair hadn’t been moved. I closed the front door and dragged the other chair to it, doing the same thing there. Candle was dropping down from the last step when I started climbing back up again. A high hiss, like something hot being doused in water, came up from it as I went up the stairs. I turned and saw it start climbing again.
I went back to Tower’s floor and checked all of the rooms except the closed door that the massive gem used to sit beside. The warning about that room was strongest of them all and I couldn’t bring myself to open that door. I backed away from it and left the study, promising myself to check the rest of the tower before opening that door.
I walked back into the stairway and checked both of the chairs. He was either above me or in the cellar and hadn’t come up yet. Those were the only options. I was sure I would climb up the stairs and find him on the roof, maybe reading in the sun. He’d grin at me and think I was ridiculous for being worried. Maybe he’d be cross with me for going into his room. I was hoping for it.
I climbed the stairs and checked my room. Nothing. I walked back out and climbed higher. I went through all of the empty rooms and floors as I neared the roof. They were places I had never gone into since my first few days in the tower. They felt neglected and cold and scared me. Their emptiness gnawed at the back of my neck when I was inside them. I closed the doors tightly when I finished my search.
My heart sank when I reached the roof. I walked carefully around the edge, stupidly looking over the side of the tower to see if maybe he fell and was hanging on. It didn’t cross my mind to think of how that could happen or why he hadn’t been calling for help. I was desperate.
On my way down the tower I was equally sure that I would find him in the cellar as I had been about finding him on the roof. When I first went into his study he must have come out of the bedroom and went downstairs while I was busy looking where the massive gem had once been. That was the only explanation. He must have done some complicated experiment with the gem and that’s why he slept so late. I’d find him in the cellar drinking water or maybe gathering spider silk. That had to be it.
The chairs were still in their respective places and Candle was now jumping down the steps one at a time. It must have learned that it was never hurt from falling and bounced down each step. I moved the chair and went down into the cellar. It was dark and I focused all of my senses on my hearing, straining for any noise that might give away that Tower was there.
I stepped into the cellar and it was as I had left it. The spider rattled in its cell at the sight of me, as a reminder that I hadn’t fed it yet. I checked the entire room, even going as far as to dig through the pile of rocks in the corner. Any possibility. The tunnel was still collapsed as it had always been. He hadn’t been down here.
My body felt numb when I climbed back to the tower’s main room. I scooped up Candle on my way up, after finding it diving down the cellar steps after me. I carried my familiar as I entered the study and walked to the closed door at the far end.
“That door is locked and it’s locked for a reason. You must never try to get inside that room,” Tower’s words came back to me as I neared the door.
I placed my hand on the door handle and stopped. It was probably locked and he wasn’t in there. I considered that Tower might have left for a walk and had simply lost track of time. He said he could sense where the tower was, after all. He might be cross with me about going into this room.
I shook my head and wanted to cry. There were too many conflicting thoughts for a young boy to have. I decided to try to open the door and let the lock decide for me. I turned the handle and pushed and the door didn’t move.
I closed my eyes and tried pulling instead. The door jerked out of its frame and opened into the study. I pulled it open further and took a deep breath before stepping inside.
Chapter Fifteen
The door closed by itself behind me. I could see no mechanism that caused it but there was a feeling of resistance as I opened the door, as if it wanted to stay closed. I pushed on the door to make sure I could still open it and it shifted to my weight. I wasn’t trapped but I wished the door would stay open.
There was no light in the room except for Candle’s. I held my hand out and the fire elemental’s light radiated out enough that I could see the floor. My familiar was still too small to fully light the room. The shadows felt like an uncomfortable veil around me as I walked, masking the walls so I couldn’t see the size of the room.
The darkness reminded me of being in the tunnels and I shuddered. Candle vibrated in response on my hand and I had a moment of concern for its well-being. I considered turning around and leaving it in the safety of the study but I selfishly felt safer with it with me. It was more than its light that was keeping me from running out of the dark.
Ten or so steps into the room I saw the far wall. It was curved and seemed to stretch around back to the doorway. I estimated that the room was circular and no more wide than the study. It made sense since there was no room protruding out of the tower from outside.
I took a few steps closer to the wall and saw Candle’s light catch something amongst the stones. The reflected light made me think of a mirror, but as I drew closer I saw that our image was too blurry and distorted. The object looked more like a window built into the wall, but only stone could be seen through it.
Candle and I looked like a blurry mess of shapes and colors in the glass but even that didn’t feel right. The material looked to be closer to the clear gemstones than anything else.
I reached up to touch it with my free hand, curious to find out if it was the same gemstone barrier spell that I had seen Tower create. Perhaps it was some sort of spell that would let me know where he was. I know now I was grasping for any reason to bring my teacher back but as a boy I truly believed it.
My fingers pressed against the window and I felt like something snapped at them. I snatched my hand back as if something sharp had bitten into my fingertips. The pain was surprisingly potent for only barely touching the thing but I had no time to wonder at it. The glass, or whatever it was, had started to shake and glow.
I backed up away from it and I couldn’t stop Tower’s words of warning from repeating again and again in my head. The glow from the window spread to the stone wall around it and ran horizontally around the room. It snaked through the gaps of the stones, illuminating the pieces that were holding the walls together, and filling the room with light.
The room was empty now that I could see it all. Tower wasn’t there, but fear was currently stronger than my disappointment. There was no furniture except for the window but the walls were covered in writing. Large, red letters as if they had been burned into the stone.
The words frightened me more than the window. It was as if they could reach out and grab me from the walls with their warnings. The letters were rough and uneven, as if the person who scored them had been afraid as they did so.
“DO NOT DIG,” one said.
“DO NOT TRUST
THE BOY,” was another.
“THE TOWER IS ALIVE.”
“i’m so hungry.”
“I died but I’m still here.”
“Dragon. Dragon. Dragon.”
The phrase “can’t leave” was repeated all over the walls, in varying sizes and squeezed between different words. Some of them were too faded to make out.
My eyes rested on “THE TOWER IS ALIVE” and I walked toward it. My heart jumped at the words. The tower? Not Tower? I put my hand on the letters and I could feel the familiar sense of magic in them. There was a pattern in the stone that I could recognize.
I moved back to the door and focused my magic on the wall there. I recreated the pattern in a simple line and saw the same red marking appear as the words were. I looked closer at the wall and saw similar straight lines as if many others had made the same discovery that I just did. Whoever had written these words had been able to use magic.
Candle began making spitting noises on my hand and tore my attention from the wall. Behind me the door whipped open and I flinched from the sudden movement. I ran through it quickly, not willing to risk being in the room any longer.
In the study I was shocked to find that the light was continuing to spread through the walls. The gaps of the stones were glowing just as they had in the room. The light stretched all the way to Tower’s bedroom door and traced through the perimeter of the entire study.
I opened the bedroom door and saw that the light didn’t reach into the walls of that room. I looked into the main chamber and saw that it was only the study that was being effected. I walked back in and started back to the room with the window’s door to close it.
I was near the room when the light abruptly stopped. The window flashed for a moment as if it had sucked all the light back into itself and the door slammed itself shut. Without thinking I dragged one of the chests from the wall and shoved it against the door so it couldn’t open. The thought of the words on the wall made me shiver even after the room was closed off.
The shock of the room lingered with me for a few hours. It was evening when I finally recovered and I was slumped at the dinner table. The food I made that morning had gotten cold and stale and I didn’t care. Even with Candle next to me I had still failed to find Tower. There was nowhere left to look for him.
My familiar with me or not, I was abandoned and alone.
More than a week passed before I fully accepted that Tower wasn’t coming back.
I spent those first days in a miserable haze. I barely ate and, I shamefully admit, neither did the spider. I only recall giving it meat once during that week and I didn’t care enough to check if it was too much or too little food.
Not even Candle’s early days of growth and discovery could improve my mood. I even began to resent my familiar, as if it was his fault—I had began to consider the familiar a ‘he’—that Tower had vanished. I couldn’t help but think that by using the wrong kind of fire that I had disappointed my mentor enough to abandon me.
At the end of the week I realized that it was ridiculous to think that Tower would have left his own life behind, his home and book collection, just as a way to punish me. That thought was the spark that I needed to cast off the gloom around me. Even without Tower I still had a home, a friend in Candle, and a life to maintain until Tower returned. I would not yet consider that he might be dead.
I used a few gemstones to make myself feel safe in the tower. I was too small to move some of the heavy furniture, and I expended a few gems worth of magical energy to stack the heavier chests and trunks in the study to barricade the door that led to the window room. It hadn’t seemed as dangerous as Tower had warned at the time, but as the days passed I felt more afraid of the scrawled words on the walls. I couldn’t lose the feeling that I had avoided something horrible.
In the main chamber, I moved the dining table with another gemstone. I propped it against the front door of the tower. I had no idea how the protective magic of the tower worked or if it would even still remain now that Tower was missing. With the table blocking the door from opening, I felt safer knowing that I had at least a few minutes of warning before someone, or something, broke its way inside.
I began exercising and eating regularly again. I fed the spider extra portions of meat as an apology for neglecting it.
Candle followed me around faithfully wherever I went. I slept in the main chamber near the table, wanting to be near if Tower did come back and start knocking when he found the door to be blocked. Candle took to sleeping next to me and radiating a gentle warmth near my body. I would look after him during the day and then he would watch over me at night. It was one of my few comforts during those early days.
At the end of summer I started reading again. I still had a large supply of gemstones to work with but I was never taught how to suspend food. Each meal I made would quickly decay and be wasted, although I did teach myself how to heat food up by drawing magic from another stone. It was similar to the same heat I could channel through Candle’s body.
I spent days sorting out Tower’s book collection in a way that I could understand. I made separate piles for books that Tower did and did not write. I discovered that roughly half of those in his hand were copies made of the older ones, probably to save the information in case of a fire. I further separated those books out by their topic, wanting to keep all of the books on magical theories, spells, and practices where I could easily find them. I made a mess of the study by the end of it.
Surprisingly, most of the older books were written by the same person. The name Suzanne Eliot accompanied almost all of the leather bound tomes, and every book on magic. I wondered if she had been the person to teach Tower magic and frowned. I tried not to think of him too often.
I read the book on elemental familiars first and I learned to properly take care of Candle. He required either a fire source to gather energy or a gemstone. I moved the candle from my bedroom and he spent a few hours each day bathing in its flame.
He stopped growing near the beginning of autumn. The tallest point of his fire was nearly above my knee and he could climb stairs much more comfortably. I learned that I could temporarily extinguish his fire and hold the sollite core if he was ever in danger. It would cool quickly and be placed in my pocket if needed. Water had a similar effect and would not do any permanent damage to Candle. It was the core that was the important part of him.
Teaching myself magic was a slow process and it was the beginning of winter before I could suspend food and other items. From then on I wasted significantly less food and created much larger meals from each gem. It was a proud moment when I fully accepted that I had taught myself something, independent of Tower or anyone else. It changed something within me and awakened a hunger for more knowledge and information. I read through as many books as I could looking for new spells to master.
I harvested the spider silk alone to seal up the windows from the cold. The idea of stepping outside of the tower’s boundaries was still a daunting one, and I didn’t risk collecting leaves for the silk. I used more paper from the books instead, although it was a painstaking process to tear out each individual page and then close it back up again for them to reappear.
More gems were added to the water on the roof to warm the rooms below. I began extracting gems from the rocks spilling in from the collapse in the cellar. The thought that I might exhaust that supply bothered me from the very first day. I had no idea how far the cave-in stretched inside the tunnel or how many gems I had before I dug back into the mines.
The thought of reopening the cellar to the underground full of monsters was one that kept me up at night. I only took the loose rocks at first and left the tightly packed ones alone. I spent as little time in the cellar as possible and took all the gems upstairs with me.
By the end of winter I had moved into Tower’s floor and used his bedroom. I had left it alone up until that point and spent a horrible first night in there. I was terrified that I would wake up and find him there,
furious with me for sleeping in his bed. Then in the morning I woke up and cried when he wasn’t. I was still alone.
At the end of the first year I learned how to combine gems and began my own replacement of the one that sat in the corner. The stack of furniture blocking the window room had become normal to me by then and I barely thought about the door any longer. Still, I only went near that side of the room to add more magic to the giant gemstone. I loved adding new gems and seeing the magic run over it like honey being poured over the surface. When the stone was small it would change colors and react to whatever the last gem been added to it. As it grew larger it maintained the deep red that Tower’s had. It felt like I had restored a small piece of the room.
The next few years passed in a similar way. I continued learning and growing both physically and mentally. I became much more accomplished in magic and, as the winters came and went, I looked forward less and less to how impressed Tower would be when he finally returned. I gradually accepted my new life with Candle and strove to learn for myself. My life became comfortable.
I found a supply of clothes in the drawers in Tower’s room. Most of them were too large at first and hung loosely on my body. I continued to exercise and strengthen myself, always keeping the image of the frail old wizard in my mind and how magic could burn so easily through a body that weak. I grew from a boy to an adolescent in those years, caught in that awkward phase before adulthood.
The comfort of that life was probably necessary after losing my village and Tower. Still, looking back, I can’t help but see how foolish and complacent I was, even if I was a boy. Most young men make mistakes when they first strike out on their own. Some are too overconfident and rush into things. Some are scared into inaction.
For me, it was a lack of preparation. I was sixteen years old and it was the beginning of my fifth winter alone in the tower. The first snow had just fallen and I was considering adding another gem to the roof. I had just added my last few gems to the now giant one in the study so went down into the cellar for more.
The Wizard And The Dragon Page 14