The Tower: Book One of the Legend of the Artificer

Chapter 1

It started out pretty simple. Most things tend to start out simple. This was no different, really.

They fell asleep, dreaming of a headset fluctuating between being too hard on their skull to too soft, garbled voices over the phone with words they couldn't parse through, their own voice asking for someone to repeat that, please, we don't have any for this county, we're waiting on a shipment, we're overbooked, could you please repeat that, please repeat, I didn't hear you, over and over again, as words became more unintelligible until only one word remained: covid.

It was par for the course for this work. Their entire life had so quickly come to revolve around the virus, so it was no real shock that they would dream about it, too, but one lucid moment in the midst of fitful dreams rose up a quiet, tremulous request.

Can I go anywhere else?

It was easy, after that. One moment, they were resting easy in their bed, or as easy as they could, fitful dreams waking them up and putting them back under, the anxiety of missing their alarm again making it impossible to slumber for much longer than a few hours at a time. One moment, they were fast asleep curled around an overly-large lion plushie, which they swore helped with their hips, of course it helped with their hips, and the next they were asleep again, but it was a different kind of asleep. A kind of asleep that left them wide, wide awake, in an endless expanse of towers of books and dappled light coming from a skylight that was too high up to see.

"Am I dreaming?" they asked the silence, and there was a cha-ching! They swerved to look behind them, and there sat an owl behind a desk, a typewriter before it with keys that were making no noise as some unseen force pressed them down in a dizzying pattern that left them feeling like it was wrong, splattering ink they could not see on paper that did not move, not even to sway with the force of each strike.

"Not nearly enough, my dear," the owl said and reached up with one feathery wing to adjust the glasses sitting primly on its beak.

"Oh," they murmured and turned, the plushie still clutched tightly to them, to look up at the endless expanse of books going round and round in a circle that seemed to stretch on forever and ever. "I'm sorry."

They weren't sure what they were sorry for, but it felt like the right thing to say.

"Well, it's hardly your fault," the owl said brusquely, and flitted up to sit on the desk and stride across the expanse of it which only seemed to get longer and longer the more they stared at it. "Now, what will we do about it?"

"... Let me wake up?" That didn't seem like the right answer, but this dream felt unhinged as it was. They were rarely ever so clear, and they found that they weren't enjoying it all that much.

"Precisely. We will be waking-" and here the owl loomed closer, becoming impossibly larger, "you-" and every feather stood on end as it came ever closer and closer, "UP!"

The last word was a thunderous roar that sent their hair flying back and their clothes flapping in the wind, and the owl was so large all light in the room was eclipsed in its presence. For a moment, the only thing that existed was luminous golden eyes, burning in the hush of the room, and they were breathless in the face of it. Every muscle in their body was frozen, and their fingers were crushing into the soft plush of the stuffie. It felt like if they breathed, they might anger it. Something in its eyes searched in them, pulling their soul out like strands of spun gold, before it all coiled back into their chest like it had never left.

"Now," the owl said suddenly, and they blinked, because it had been larger, hadn't it? It had, it had to have been larger- "let's get ourselves comfortable. I have only a limited time before your soul remembers where it's supposed to be, and you need to be gone by then. But fear not, young one, I'm a professional."