The Endless Spire

Prologue

The Spire has no origin that anyone living can name. It stands alone in the moorland, a black needle of ancient stone wrapped in perpetual fog, and it has been there long enough that the region's oldest maps mark it simply as a warning rather than a landmark. Those who approach find a door where none existed a moment before. Those who enter do not return the way they came. For as long as climbers have attempted the Spire, they have brought back fragments — scrawled notes, half-mad accounts, the occasional artifact pulled from a sealed chest on some lower floor. None have reached the top. None agree on what they saw. The floors shift, the dangers escalate, and the tower itself seems to learn from those who wound it. Between levels, small antechambers offer rest and warmth that feel almost like mercy — though whether the Spire grants these out of design or cruelty has never been settled. Now something has changed. Beneath the tower's familiar low hum, those sensitive enough to notice have begun to hear a second frequency — irregular, discordant, like a second heartbeat badly out of time with the first. Whatever the Spire has always been, it is becoming something else. The iron door still swings open for those who approach. The moorland path still seals shut behind them. The climb still waits.