“As I bear the signet of the master of this tower, I command you. Stand aside!”
A bright light shone from the ring. The flash was so brilliant, Yorda staggered, taking two or three steps backward before she regained her footing. As one, the idols’ heads glowed in response. Unbound energy ran along the lines of their misshapen forms, and a bridge of lightning spanned the air between statues and ring.
With a heavy grinding sound, the two idols parted to either side, revealing a dark rectangular space behind them. At the same time, the light faded, leaving Yorda’s hands numb and tingling. The spell ward was broken.
Yorda stepped forward. A chill wind blew out from the tower, brushing past her cheek. She was alone in darkness and silence.
Yorda had given Ozuma his orders that morning: he was to fight his best in the final round of the tournament and emerge victorious. Yet it must not seem an easy win. Even if his opponent was no match for him, Ozuma was to drag the fight out, driving the spectators to a frenzy. She wanted everyone in that arena to forget, if only for a while, the passage of time. She wanted them to lose themselves in a fight so spectacular they could not tear their eyes away, not even for a moment.
She needed time.
The queen would be watching the final match with cruel curiosity, her eye on Ozuma as he worked his craft on the arena floor. She alone knew that he would one day be a statue in her gallery, and she would want to see just how good he was so she would know what she would be taking from this world.
All that Yorda required was that the queen’s interest be held long enough to distract her attention from other things.
She remembered her father’s quaking voice when he visited her chambers. She’ll find me, he said.
The queen knew everything. Even the slightest disturbance, the merest presence within the borders of the enchantment she had laid upon the castle could alert her, as it had when Yorda made her attempt to leave the castle that day. And yet the queen was only human. She might be the child of the Dark God, but she was no god herself. If something captured her mind and heart so forcefully that for a moment she had no attention to pay to stirrings within her enchantment, then it might just be possible for Yorda to enter the tower unseen. It was, in essence, Yorda’s only hope: a wager more desperate than any taking place in the arena that day.
Ozuma had promised to carry out his end of the bargain. “I will make it a match such as they have never seen, and steal the queen’s eyes with my sword,” he told her. “When her attention is captured, that will be your chance to run into the tower and do what you must do.”
There was no time for dawdling. She took a step, then another, toward the entrance to the Tower of Winds. She passed by the idols sitting silently at the sides of the doorway. She could now see inside the first floor of the tower. She was inside its walls.
The tower had few windows for a structure of its size. The darkness seemed to pool here at the bottom, thick and still. For a tower, the space was vast. The bottommost floor was shaped like a round courtyard and paved with square stones packed tightly together. The construction was very similar to the corridors within the castle proper, save for the occasional stone jutting out from the floor, its edges cracked or smashed altogether.
There was nothing here resembling decoration or furniture at all. There were no sconces or pedestals for torches; the walls were bare. Above her head was only space. The Tower of Winds was as empty as it could be.
Not the best place for hiding something, Yorda thought. Is the Book of Light truly in this place? Is my father’s soul kept here somewhere?
She spotted a spiral staircase winding up the inside wall of the high tower. A railing went along its length, adorned with sharp spikes. The bottom step was off to her right, beckoning her.
Yorda looked around in a circle. The shades she had spotted by the windows were nowhere to be seen. Had they disappeared, or were they watching, hidden in the gloom? She looked up for so long, her neck began to hurt, but she could not see all the way to the top of the tower. Yet now she sensed that the darkness above her was not entirely empty. Something was there, mingling with the natural shadows of the place. Silhouettes against a black backdrop.
Yorda stared for a while longer before finally giving up. It would be quicker to walk up the stairs to the top. My time here is fleeting.
Stepping briskly toward the stairs, she noticed something on the floor of the tower. It was a large circular design, wider than she was tall. She ran up to it and found that it had not been carved into the floor, nor painted there. Instead, it rose from the floor in relief, forming a sort of dais with its edge raised a full inch off the stones of the surrounding floor.
In the back of her mind, she dimly recollected seeing a design like this one in history books she had read years before. Suspicion grew inside her, and she found she could not take her eyes off the dais on the floor. Eventually, she had to force her feet to carry her back to the stairs. Her earlier confidence had fled, and unease was only too eager to take its place.
As she began to climb, pools of blackness emerged from the floor below her. The pools boiled and seemed to writhe across the stones as though living things. Yorda grabbed the handrail in terror and watched as pairs of glowing eyes began to emerge from the dark pools. Pair after pair spilled out into the tower, followed by inky black arms that grew out of the pools like swiftly sprouting weeds.
They were the shades of the tower, the shadows-that-walked-alone. As she watched, one after the other emerged onto the floor, their legs twisted and their backs bent horribly. They staggered more than walked, their movements an eerie dance that would have been almost humorous had the creatures not been unmistakably evil. They advanced up the stairs, leaping from step to step as they rose toward her.
Her voice fled her and Yorda put her hands to her cheeks, realizing now where the shades had gone. Quickly, she dashed up the stairs, only to see another black pool boiling on the landing just ahead of her. A creature emerged from the pool with white eyes like those behind her, but with the shadowy shape of a bird. Its wings grazed Yorda’s head as it shot across the empty center of the tower to the other side of the spiral staircase.
In that brief moment, Yorda saw that the bird-monster had a human face, its mouth open in a silent scream. Three more of the bird-shaped creatures flew up from the landing. One of them spotted Yorda as she cowered against the wall and dove straight at her. Yorda was unable to do anything but throw her hands in front of her face-but as she did so, the ring at her chest flared with a bright light.
With a whistle of wind, the creature’s wing struck Yorda’s shoulder before it careened into the wall behind her to disappear in a puff of smoke. The smoke drifted past Yorda’s face, leaving a lingering chill in the air before vanishing altogether.
Yorda looked down the stairs and saw that the creatures coming up from the floor of the tower had stopped. They recoiled in horror. The figures closest to Yorda were beginning to lose their shape, their limbs melting away and drifting off into the air.
It’s as my father said. The shadows-that-walk-alone are powerless before the ring, the symbol of this kingdom’s former glory and his love for his people.
Yorda held the ring up in front of her face. As she watched, the threads of darkness spilling from the pool on the landing ahead of her dissipated. Soon the pool evaporated entirely. Yorda quickly ran up the stairs, going so fast she stumbled once or twice. Each time, she caught herself with her hands on the stairs and continued to climb. Once, she nearly lost her balance and made the mistake of grabbing the handrail to her left. Her hand caught on one of the sharp spikes and began to bleed, yet still she climbed, legs in constant motion. Finally, when she was breathing so hard she felt her chest would burst, she stopped for a moment to catch her breath. She looked around and saw that she had climbed more than halfway up the tower.