Chapter 3: The Cascading Tower

    Too many things had happened in the past few hours for me to believe they were anything more than the unfolding events of a nightmare. Fallen kings, slaughtered noblemen, tattered raiment, furniture thrown hastily behind me, the constant shouts for my head, the servants whom previously admired me, now shrieking away as I darted through the narrow corridors of the castle. I struggled to fathom just how quickly a collected life could turn into the blossom of a blooming, flourishing chaos. Not that I had to think hard about it. The blood splashes yearning to seep into the fabric of my clothes was telling enough.

    “I hear him, this way!” someone’s shouts bounced around me in the stone walls.

    I crushed another vial’s contents beneath my boot, holding my breath as the chemicals interacted with the air, and gas filled the hallway. I fled as my pursuers began retching again. “Back, back! Find another route!” someone said while others ignored the warning, held their breaths and chased me through the gas.

    I waited for one of their silhouettes to rush through the smoke, greeting their body with my dagger’s point. Briefly, I watched the stranger’s surprised expression before I pushed him stumbling backwards, to be swallowed by horrified cries and smoke once more. But you cannot scream without breathing. Those who reacted to the body inhaled the smoke, and their convulsions began.

    “M-m-madman!” someone choked.

    “Killer!”

    I ignored the shrill voices and rushed towards door ahead of me. To my left and right, a corridor swarmed with pursuers who all seemed to find me simultaneously. I opened the door and threw down the wooden bar as soon as I was on the other side, only to find three armored guards who had anticipated my movement, waiting inside with their blades drawn.

    My parrying dagger slid eagerly from its sheath, happy to be reunited beside its already drawn companion. The smooth, ivory handle that matched the other’s was comfortably cold in my palm. I breathed deeply, preparing myself.

Before tonight, I never considered the act of killing beyond a thought of intrigue. But here, dancing around the odds of my own death, morality became an increasingly distant consideration as murder became not only inevitable, but demanded, an ignorable opportunity for impassioned expression in a rare, quintessential art.

    I flourished my daggers until my grips were relaxed yet firm, melding flesh to steel.

    “Come on then, traitor!”

                                                              ~   ~

    Zakora, the woman who I owed my expertise in fighting to, was never one for tender instruction. Punching, slapping, and ridiculing was her preferred method for drilling technique into me. But, when it came to describing the more abstract details of fighting, she had a propensity for becoming intensely romantic. This always seemed to inspire in me a brief and overwhelming affection for her.

    After one of our sparring sessions, as Zakora helped me unstring some of the stitchings on the back of my leather armor, she asked me, “What makes a good swordsman, Casimir?”

    “This is one of those instances where you pretend to want my answer, but if we’re both being honest, you just want to—Agh!”

    “I’ll let go of your arm once you stop being so childish. Now, answer the question,” she’d insisted as she pulled my wrist up to my shoulders.

    “Childish, now which one of us is truly being childish?” I grumbled, only to earn another tug that pulled my shoulder that much closer to popping from its socket. “Fine, fine! I suppose a good swordsman is someone who is agile, cunning, practiced, and ah, swift as the wind and so forth, yes? You’ll let go of me now, won’t you?”

    “You are right, but not quite,” she said as she relinquished my arm and turned me around, now placing her hands on my shoulders. Her lips were a finger’s distance from mine, but I didn’t shy away. “When you are fighting, you must not be a swordsman, Casimir. Swordsmen die. We are born masters at dying, but living—ah, quite the opposite—that is the art of forgetting how to. When you are fighting, you must not even be Casimir. Forget yourself, your name, your body. Instead, be the steel of your daggers, the force that pushes them in, the strength of their metal. Be their instrument so that, through you, their song may be given a voice.” Her accent forced out stunted sentences between frequent pauses, between which, it seemed my ears perked to catch every syllable, to fill in her imagination where her words could not. And I realized, in that moment, that her passion, if taught through enough pupils, could destroy armies.

    “What songs do my daggers sing, Zakora?” I asked, seeking answers that words would not afford in the darkness rimmed by her ashen eyes.

    “That is for the instrument to discover on his own, for every blade is different, and every opponent is a unique score, their flesh a blank page.” As she said that, a chilled breeze breathed through my body, and I wondered just how much farther I would have to lean to kiss her. As I’d done before, I weighed the reward against the cost of her fist slamming into my cheek. The conclusion always seemed to be the same, but I had dreams of one day being foolish enough to think it was worth it.

    “You know, Casimir,” she said with almost a detectable touch of sadness, “My time left in Addoran is nearing its end. It has been nearly five years since our first sparring session.” She laughed and shook her head, doubtless, recollecting how I acted then. “After I return to Zorran, will your daggers sing melodies that folks talk about all over the realm? Performances that reach beyond the seas?”

    Could it be as I suspected? Was our mutual fascination with weaponry and fighting styles compelled by a darker fixation, an artist’s compulsion to force life out of its shell? Was death not the focal inspiration for so much of life’s meaning, with gods or not, with love or not? Was it not the most gratifying release, to force it to envelope opponents who offered the challenge?

    I watched her closely as she anticipated my answer. Her eyelids fluttered like a moth’s resting wings, just once, as they went from her sword and back to my gaze, seeking that same affirmation she had just offered me in the subtlety of her questions. A hopeless yearning of recognition for an unacceptable passion.

    “Perhaps, Zakora, if they are presented with scores worthy of playing, if I can be masterful enough to give them a voice to their music.”

                                                                   ~  ~

    As an entertainer, I search for that sacred place where intuition and imagination meet, where the body ceases struggling and becomes a conduit for an unperturbed mind. So few times have I reached that state, where nothing matters besides the task at hand, and art becomes a seamless, continuous rhythm, of stillness interrupted by bursts of expression. And here, in ecstatic mayhem, amidst the screams and struggling, I had found it. The castle had become my stage, the men seeking vengeance for the King, the scores to my daggers’ melodies, and I, their instrument. They struck their notes with scarlet, swelled the air in rapturous music, biding for another gruesome crescendo.

    Three guards took turns grunting and screaming as I darted between their attacks, discovering the vulnerabilities in their armor in the most painful ways possible. A small opening on the wrist, an unsheltered calf, a sliver of the neck. For all the armor keeping them heavy on their feet, I wondered if they felt caged beneath it as I found the open spaces between them.

    The number of fists banging on the barred door lessened after some of the pursuers got to thinking about other corridors in the castle, and just which ones would lead to me. The Foxfeather Castle mapped within my mind, I reckoned my time with the guardsmen had to near its end, and quickly, before mine would be met.

Beneath my feet, a macabre river flowed out of the first guard I’d slew, his hand twitching towards the sword I’d disarmed from him before his throat revealed itself to me.

    At one end of the chamber, I stared down the two remaining guards at the other end, their bodies already contributing crimson paths that led to the large puddle between us, paths I had opened when they attempted to defend the one who now lay in silence. The one on the right meant to shift his weight, but stumbled to his knee instead. His leg gave from the pain of a gash opened from the bottom of his calf to the back of his knee.

  “W-wait!” the kneeling guard begged. He tossed his sword aside and raised his hands up. “I never wanted this, Casimir. You know how the others are,” he whimpered. “I’d look like a coward if—”

    “Is that you, Hamor, behind that ridiculous helm?” I shot back, surprised to find myself speaking at all. “You never treated me well, anyways. You showed me no mercy when your numbers favored you.”

    “Please …”

    The one of his left, however, was poised and ready to match my steel. Meanwhile, footsteps thundered through the castle, louder than the heartbeat that thudded in my ears.

    “Time is not my ally, Hamor, and so long as you’re taking mine, neither are you,” I growled as I kicked Hamor onto his back before tearing into the other, whose silence entreated my attention.

    The remaining guard’s movements were deft despite his armor, parrying my attacks quick enough, responding with broad, sweeping strikes that made me duck and retreat. Still struggling to get back up, Hamor continued to whine like a limping dog.

    In a sudden rush of excitement having seen the opportunity, I caught the guard’s longsword between the blade of my parrying dagger and hilt, applying torque to keep his weapon trapped there. With his sword pointed far to the right of me, I closed the gap between us, close enough for my second dagger to find his side while his free fist slammed into my head. The blow burst sparks of darkness as he hit me again, and again, before I twisted, then wrenched my blade out of his side and leapt backwards.

    Amidst the calamity of bloodshed, chaos rose in my veins, and sighed at this release. I realized then that ecstazia was no fighting style. It was a state of mind, a philosophy, an art of being wholly present yet detached enough to relinquish fear. Death beckoned a performance befitting its absence from my close future, and perform I would, grateful for its pernicious presence that inspired so much beauty.

    Gouts of blood sprayed out of the man’s side, decorating the walls and floor around him.

    “I believe that trade,” I chuckled, “was not in your favor.”

    Enraged by his fatal mistake, he charged at me, raising the longsword above his head and roaring. Light continued to flash through the throbbing vision of my eye. I managed, using the majority of my weight, to send the arc of his blade to the ground with a parry from one dagger, before seeking his neck with the other, sinking in just as he attempted to grab mine, meekly, before the shock overwhelmed him.

    I freed my blade, spattering the wall in red torrents. With lurching legs he staggered back and forth, gurgling as he did, before collapsing to the floor.

    “As for you,” I said, turning to address Hamor. But he had stopped moving after the wound in his leg had, finally, relinquished enough. At the thought of brief interactions we’d had in the past, a twinge of pity rose in me, before I remembered how, just moments before, he’d tried to spit on me.

    The air now saturated in iron, I left the chamber, listening to my daggers’ dimming melodies as they settled into the breathless corpses.

Striding through a narrow hall, I reached an intersection of corridors. Down one of them, I could see shadows nearing the connecting point of the hallway. I reached for another one of the vials in my pouch and threw it to the far end of the corridor, where plumes of emerald smoke gushed from its now activated components.

    I left the shouts and scampering feet behind me and listened to them trail off towards the direction of the smoke. The corridor led me to a small set of stairs before a massive, duskwood door, one that led to the Cascading Tower. Once inside, I sighed in relief and wiped the blood on my blades against my trousers before sheathing them. The tower was empty.

    The architects of Foxfeather Castle had a taste for the dramatic. A stretching spire with thickened, glass walls at the apex, the Cascading Tower was built in the center of the keep, like a stone heart surrounded by a body. At this time of night, the moonlight leaked through the glass and shimmered against the walls in resplendent waves of water-like reflection.

    Inside, twelve staircases crisscrossed to opposite sides of the tower. Beneath them, a gaping pit yawned with darkness. Dozens of hovering, silverglass orbs encasing faerie light, illuminated the tower with pulsating shades of silver as they ascended from the bottom to the top in enchanted, repeating trajectories.

    Each staircase arches between two opposite faces of the tower. Behind their doors, they lead to other parts of the east or western keep, where ascending stairs could be found within to get to higher tiers at a much faster rate. The tower’s individual staircases, themselves, didn’t do more than ascend one tier each. And for some damned reason, the architects hadn’t fashioned guardrails to the staircases.

    Since my first months in the castle, I had grown accustom to running on the staircases, despite the fact that a misstep would lead to certain death.

    I sprinted up a set of arching steps, listening to the echoing of feet somewhere off in the keep, before meeting the opposite door facing me. Entering into another chamber was folly, I realized, as my hand stopped at the handle. Inside, although I would find stairs that would ascend all the way to my chamber at the highest floor, I would find countless more bodies determined to stop me. A gamble I wasn’t willing to take, considering I’d already survived too many unfavorable odds tonight, I had an inkling that the gods of fortune were a little more than irritated that I had dodged death thus far.

I turned around and stared at the door I’d just come from. More folly.

    Even still, it was unlikely anyone assumed I had come here in my escape. I had a moment to breathe. Bespattered with blood, down to the creases in my hands, I returned to the center of the staircase and sat down. Beneath me, the seemingly infinite, black throat of the pit stared back. My lack of options seemed to shackle me there.

The silverglass orbs slowly ascended and descended around me, cycling through their paths up the spire. I admired how their silver tinge shifted like wisps of smoke continually going in and out of volume. I reached out and touched one as it passed by me, surprised to find how heavy it was, and imagining how I might die that night, considering it was the most likely possibility now.

    Then, I stood up laughing, feet tingling, as I readied myself for the next orb ascending from the depths of the pit.

    I clasped my hands together, rubbed them, and jumped for one of the hovering spheres of faerie light, dumbfounded that I had never done this, before, in my spare time. The warm, smooth surface of the silverglass briefly bobbed beneath my weight, as if considering to grant me passage through the air, before returning to its usual, ascending motion. Nearly slipping off, I wrapped my entire body around it and hugged it. Merciful gods, I hugged it.

    As we slowly crept through the air, I craned my head to see the final set of stairs awaiting me, the door that led to the hallways on the eleventh story nearly in my view. The orb and I drifted passed the ninth staircase. Just as we did, one of its connecting doors slammed open, spewing out more of my pursuers.

Their heads whipped to catch the rather ludicrous sight of me floating gently upwards.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!” I called, rather wishing that I was standing atop the sphere rather than hugging it like an infant to its mother.

    “Wretched usurper!” The insult echoed into the spire.

    “An usurper implies that I would be taking the throne from our dearly departed,” I called back. “I assure you that I have no intention of doing so.”

    “He’s going up! Someone get an archer!” another man shouted, ignoring my clarification.

    “Nonsense,” one replied. “There’s no time.” He was dressed in dark red, formal attire, and wearing a total of eight glittering rings. He unscrewed the pommel of his sword and threw it at me. Uselessly, it fell short and dropped into the pit below, which gave me something of a chuckle, at least. That is, before his expression flared with anger and he threw the entire sword, itself. I braced myself.

    “William was one of the finest kings Addoran ever had!” he shouted.

    The point of the weapon glanced off the side of the sphere, narrowly missed my legs, and sent the ball into spinning rotations that fed on its own momentum and continued to become faster and faster. As the orb neared the staircase, my senses abandoned their attempt to grasp their surroundings, surrendering to the dizziness.

    “He’s still rising! Quickly now, to the stairwell!” someone in the back shouted, causing the crowd to retreat back into the keep. Simultaneously, doors all throughout the Cascading Tower began opening, with more voices to accompany them.

    In my blurred vision, I could see the uppermost staircase nearing as the spinning hastened. As soon as it was within arm’s reach, I let go of the sphere and grasped wildly for stone, catching the stairs’ edge after my body was nearly thrust off.

My hands wet with sweat, I hauled myself onto my knees, but I could barely stand. Just as I began to experiment with balancing on my feet, the door at the bottom of the steps opened with the same people who had just greeted me. I half-stumbled, half-crawled to a higher position on the steps, a safe distance from them.

    The man who’d thrown his sword had evidently borrowed another. His older, gaunt face with a trimmed goatee and dark eyes bristled with that fierce, reckless pride of those who stand beside authority almost unquestioningly.

    “You are at your end, traitor,” he informed me.

    “Oh? I am?” I inquired, happily looking down upon him. “Personally, it doesn’t appear that way to me.”

    He scoffed. “What will you do, hole yourself up there until we force our way in, or throw yourself from a window once inside? Surrender yourself peaceably and you’ll be granted a death more honorable than the one you gave the Northern King William III,” he continued while more guards appeared behind him, even an elf that I did not recognize, dressed in scholar’s layers. One of his gloved hands glowed with the beginnings of a spell. Together they advanced slowly towards me.

    I dug through my pouch, only to find that I had already used up all of Famir’s elixirs. To my knowledge, there was nothing to bar the door behind me. There was, at least, a large likelihood that there was nobody waiting for me on the uppermost floor, as it was one of the only floors without stairwells. It was accessible only through the final staircase in the Cascading Tower.

    “Running dry of your pathetic tinctures? Fool. Answer me!” the ambassador demanded, halting their ascent.

    “Well, that is no matter to me,” I said, unsheathing my weapons again and brandishing them. “That all depends on who am I answering.”

    “The High Ambassador of Gilimnor.”

    “Well, ambassador, you at least gave me a moment of thought, so I will offer the same to you. Fair is fair, after all. Consider the idea that the Northern King was not the man you once knew in his earlier years of reign.” At this, a few of the guardsmen from our castle exchanged glances. “Consider that his end was not only justified, but necessary, for the well-being of Addoran.”

    “He was the most benevolent ruler Addoran, possibly all of Netherway, ever saw,” the ambassador pushed. “A prodigy who promised little else than prosperity and peace. It is unthinkable that his actions deserved such a cowardly end, least of all from the likes of you.”

    “Are you so certain?” I asked, confident to hear my voice ringing clear through the tower, and the voices beneath us, at last silent in their pursuit. “Time has a way of changing men, and William was of no exception.”

    “You may plead your dismal case at your trial, but I have no doubt that a fool, not only guilty of regicide, but the murder of dozens during his act of fleeing, will be treated with a very forgiving eye.”

    “Oh, I thought not,” I sighed. “All the same.”

    “So surrender yourself!”

    “High Ambassador of, oh, what was it? Dying was not something I planned for this evening, so I must respectfully decline.”

    “You swine! Seize him!”

    I took the last three steps in a single stride, pulling open the door and leaning my weight backwards as I grasped the handle. In the unlit corridors of the eleventh floor, I heard nothing besides my own heartbeat, my labored breath, the slamming of feet against stone steps. Excitement begged me to leave the door, sprint for my chamber, and execute the final act of my escape. A smile tugged on the corners of my lips to feel everything falling into place, but I quelled the impulse. I pulled harder on the handle as resistance arrived. There was no sense in leaving any loose ends that I had the power to cut in this moment. I was going to leave hundreds in one evening.

    The ambassador and the other men continued to tug on the door. I dug my heels into the carpet on the floor and leaned further back.

    “This is futile. Surrender!” the Ambassador shouted through the door.

I could not help, as my muscles strained to resist three men, but to chuckle a little. Just as I felt their strength nearing its peak, I let go of the handle. Their strength did the rest.

    The door gave in to all their force in one violent surrender, sending them toppling backwards over one another, to the mercy of balance, height and the pit of the Cascading Tower.

    The guards tumbled off screaming, but the ambassador was fortunate enough to cling to one of the stairs’ edges as his body dangled. Steel armor clanged against stone as the guards’ bodies toppled below, with shrill cries of death to accompany the racket. The elf, smarter than the rest, was standing at a safe distance, glaring at me from the center of the stairs. As I eyed him, another swarm of people squeezed through the opposite doorway.

I didn’t bother shutting the door, just ran through the darkened hallways. A splash of fire erupted close to my head where one of the mage’s spells guttered against a wall.

    In my chamber, I threw down the iron latches that locked the door and swept over my belongings, the ones I hadn’t packed, as if looking at all of them would reveal to me some importance I hadn’t considered before. Excitement turned my fingers into useless, twitching nubs while memories flooded my head. Despite the horrors of the past year or so, I felt nostalgic to be leaving everything so hurriedly. I never intended to leave Portsworth this way. It was the first place I ever belonged to, even if it was only as someone’s Fool.

    Beside the satchel I had packed was the iron cage I never closed. Atop it, a strange and loyal little creature cawed in relief to see me, immediately joining me on my shoulder. His black beak shone in the moonlight granted by the terrace that jutted out of my chamber.

    “Felix, you would not believe me if I told you what kind of evening I have had,” I said as I belted the leather strips of the satchel across my chest, replacing my half-cloak over my shoulder afterwards. “It appears we’re rather pressed for time, however.”

    The pounding on the door started again. For the second time that day, I listened to the beat of countless strangers who desired nothing more than to kill me.

    “Unfortunately, there is little time for discussion.”

    Felix responded with a somewhat confused croak.

    “You will have to find something to eat sometime later. Perhaps … perhaps without me,” I said, realizing it aloud. “Do you remember when I showed you the Silver Pool? You thought I’d died after I jumped for it. Elves aren’t bred with wings, after all.”

    The noises stopped. I hushed Felix and tilted my head towards the door. There were murmurs and whispers that strung together with little to no pause, only for the intake of breath. The hairs on my body prickled at the sound of a long incantation. I strode quickly through the chamber and out the doors of the terrace, before balancing myself upon its guardrails, staring down at yet another dizzying height that made my hands perspire.

    Only this time, the height was not just a pit, but the steep descent of cliffs overlooking a small pool of water at its feet. It was a plummet that would turn an entire ship into driftwood.

    At this height, amongst the wind, Felix took to his wings and joined the clouded sky while I savored a final view of Portsworth’s decadence. The countless flames alight in the mismatching streets flickered. Carriages rolled over the uneven cobblestone, while fog swirled low over the steaming chimneys of taverns, homes, shops and chapels.

    Behind me, the drapes flapped in the same wind that coaxed me to go over the edge.

    “How things change,” I whispered to the wind. The flashing events of the evening played over again in my head.

    My chamber door erupted in an explosion that shook the floor. Flairs of heat licked my arms, sizzling pieces of wood spewed out, and embers of the mage’s spell burnt the ends of my hair. I closed my eyes and sighed.

    “He’s a madman!”

    “Stop him!”

    I let my body fall forward, arms spread as wings, embracing the plummet.