Every Loop Costs a Friend

Chapter 6 - The Morning Before

Chapter 6 · 1,482 words

Soren counted the duty sheets pinned to the bunk room wall. Seven mornings, seven fresh sheets, each one a confirmation that the world continued in the direction he expected. He ate in the common hall. He cleaned gear he didn't need cleaned. He reported to the training yard and ran drills until Garran dismissed the Initiates for the day.

Nothing in the city suggested catastrophe.

The merchant quarter bustled with late-season trade. Caravans from the southern provinces clogged the wide roads, their drivers arguing over toll prices. Children chased each other through the market stalls. The imperial council issued a routine tariff adjustment and nobody read past the headline.

Soren waited.

The first two days were manageable. He told himself the tower had been a fever dream, something the body produces under stress, a misfire of exhausted nerves. He was a new Initiate with no family in the capital, sleeping on a narrow bunk, eating food he hadn't chosen. The mind did strange things under those conditions. He'd read about it in Garran's training manuals: sensory distortion under prolonged fatigue.

By the third day, the explanation felt thin.

He found himself scanning the sky whenever he stepped outside. The merchant quarter's horizon was clear. Low rooftops, warehouse chimneys, the distant copper dome of the Exchange. Nothing above it. Nothing black against the blue.

By the fourth day, his hands had started shaking. Only in quiet moments. When he sat alone in the common hall with weak coffee going cold in front of him. When he lay in his bunk staring at the gray ceiling, listening to the breathing of six other Initiates who had no idea what was coming.

The fifth day he almost said something to Kael. They were oiling their gear in the equipment room, and Kael mentioned the weather. Clear skies forecast for the week, good for the caravans. Soren opened his mouth. Closed it. What would he say? *I've seen a tower appear above that skyline. I've been inside it. I died there.*

Kael would look at him the way you look at someone who's lost their grip on things.

The sixth day, Soren stopped sleeping. He lay in the bunk with his eyes open, counting the breaths of the man above him, listening to the building settle into its nighttime sounds. The guild was quiet. The city was quiet. Everything was perfectly, intolerably normal.

On the seventh morning, he stood in the courtyard before dawn.

The sky was pale gray with early light. The courtyard's packed dirt was damp from overnight mist. Soren could feel the cold through the thin soles of his boots. He'd been standing there for an hour, his back against the stone wall, his arms crossed. He hadn't decided to come here. His body had simply brought him.

The light changed in a single breath. Sourceless. Flat. The sky became a sheet of parchment. The shadows under the weapon racks sharpened, then vanished entirely.

Soren's hands found the wall behind him. Stone. Cold. Real.

A pressure. The city's ambient noise compressed into a narrower band, the air itself thickening. Then the shouts started. From the merchant quarter. From the streets beyond the guild wall. A woman screaming. A bell beginning to ring in a pattern that meant emergency, not celebration.

He looked up.

The tower was there.

It rose above the merchant quarter exactly where he remembered. Seamless black, no windows, no visible doors, its surface absorbing the strange flat light rather than reflecting it. The angle was right. The scale was right. The shadow it cast fell across the rooftops with a weight he could feel on his skin, a pressure that had nothing to do with wind or temperature.

His body knew it before his mind accepted it. The grip on the wall tightened until his fingers ached. His breath stopped. His lungs refused to expand. The world narrowed to the tower's silhouette and the exact quality of light around its base, that sourceless gray that seemed to emanate from the black surface itself.

It was identical. Every detail. The angle, the proportions, the way the shadow fell. His memory hadn't distorted it. His memory hadn't invented it.

The tower was real. He had been inside it. He had died there.

The six-day hope ceased to function. What replaced it was colder than panic. A certainty settled into his chest.

The guild's alarm bell began to ring. Boots on stone. Voices shouting orders. The emergency mobilization had started.

Soren pushed himself off the wall. His hands were shaking again, but his legs worked. He walked toward the briefing hall because there was nowhere else to go.

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The assembly was chaos contained by discipline.

Officers shouted assignments across the briefing room. Maps were unrolled and weighted down with iron clips. Equipment clerks moved through the crowd distributing supply packs with the mechanical efficiency of people who had rehearsed this. The smell of oiled leather and iron hung in the air. Fresh gear, factory-stiff, nothing broken in yet.

Soren's team gathered in the eastern quadrant of the room. Seven other Initiates, a Copper-rank team leader named Eamon, and a Silver-rank navigator whose name Soren didn't know. The navigator was spreading a chart of the merchant quarter's street grid, marking approach routes to the tower's base.

Eamon was talking. Something about perimeter assignments, supply carry positions, the standard protocol for first-contact expeditions. Soren heard the words. None of them connected.

He looked at the faces around him. Young. Some of them barely older than him. A girl with braided hair was checking her pack straps for the third time. A broad man with a shaved head.

Kael.

Kael was here. Scar through the eyebrow, gauntlets on, standing with the easy confidence of someone who believed the world was roughly fair and his place in it was earned.

Soren's throat closed.

*Eamon. The approach routes. The tower's base will be—*

"Something on the first floor."

The words came out of his mouth before he'd decided to speak. The team looked at him. Eamon stopped mid-sentence.

"Say again, Ashfall?"

Soren's mouth was dry. He could feel the pulse in his temples. "The first floor. Inside the tower. There's something—" He stopped. What? *Entities you can't see. They kill without warning. You can't fight them because you can't find them.* "There's a threat. On the first floor. It's—"

"What kind of threat?" Eamon's patience lived in the tilt of his head, the relaxed set of his shoulders, the way his eyes stayed level and unhurried.

"I can't—" The words died. He couldn't say *I've been there.* He couldn't say *I died there.* He couldn't say *I woke up seven days ago with no proof and now the tower is back and I know what's inside.*

"You're spooked, Ashfall," said the broad man next to Kael, an Initiate Soren barely knew. "We all are. First expedition."

"I'm not—" Soren started. Stopped. The girl with braided hair was watching him. Her eyes had gone careful.

Eamon put a hand on Soren's shoulder. Brief. Professional. "Listen. Everyone's nervous. That's normal. But we've got a job to do, and the guild wouldn't be sending us in if they hadn't assessed the risk. You understand?"

Soren understood that Eamon believed what he was saying. He understood that the guild had assessed nothing, because the guild had never seen the inside of the tower. He understood that every person in this room was walking toward something he could describe in precise, terrible detail, and none of them would believe him if he did.

"Yes," Soren said.

Eamon nodded and turned back to the map.

Soren stood in his assigned position and said nothing else. The briefing continued. Assignments were finalized. The team moved to the equipment room to collect their gear.

He walked with them. He checked his shield strap. The factory crease still there, the leather stiff and unmarked. He took his supply pack. He followed the team toward the assembly yard where the expedition would form up.

He had tried. He had opened his mouth and tried. And the world had absorbed his warning as nothing more than a young scout's nerves.

The tower's shadow was visible above the guild walls now. A dark line against the sky, casting its weight across the city. Soren could feel it on his neck as he walked.

He would go into the tower again. Because there was no alternative that didn't involve standing in this courtyard while everyone he knew walked into a slaughter he couldn't prevent.

The expedition formed up in the assembly yard. Soren took his position in the eastern quadrant. The packed dirt was hard under his boots. The weapon racks stood in their usual rows. Everything was the same as it had been the first time.

The tower's shadow fell across his hands.

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