The Tower of Wind

Vlad: We took the turtle with us. Lenar would have had our hides if we left it behind.

Vic and I scrounged from the winter stores for food while Lenar retrieved our knives from wherever grandma had hidden them. The stories were still going on. Midnight had not passed us by yet. We didn't stop to say good-bye to anyone or to watch the speakers. We did not have tear-filled eyes or any such childish nonsense.

We were wildly excited, heading out on an adventure of unknown scope. We were mildly apprehensive — no one had ever properly explored the haunted region, not since it became haunted. The stories about that place are too numerous to tell, but the main one describes strange, small, dark-skinned humanoids.

Mostly, we were thrilled for the runaway aspect of the whole trip. I mean, come on, what would our parents do to themselves when they found us missing? How would our grandma glare at them, probably knowing full well what was going on? How would our siblings suffer without our guidance?

We thought we'd be back in a week, to cheers and love and mild reproach.

We never thought we almost wouldn't return at all.

Vic: Vlad's getting good at those statements. Someday, I'll explain them to you.

In the meantime, Lenar, Vlad and I left town. Vlad jealously guarded the turtle, which spent most its time in a bucket of water, hopefully not thinking anything important. Lenar watched him and the bucket with equanimity, because the turtle had landed on Vlad and the bucket was old and leaky.

Even though I had caught the turtle and maybe saved it from untimely demise, I let Vlad carry it. Yes, he insisted, but I would've happily given it to Lenar rather than carry it myself. Turtles may be important, but I'm not that interested.

Anyway, we circled out of the town, past the fields, with the moons shining above us and Heliotosis whipping our cloaks about us. We walked with purpose, with pride, with excitement, thrill and energy, heading toward our unknown but prophesized fate in the haunted region.

We walked with speed, with grace ...

Vlad: She's hesitating here, because she's the one who tripped and dumped half our food in the mud and she doesn't want to admit it. But it is what happened next.

The trees aren't particularly tall, and there's a lot of underbrush. The brush doesn't grow in more than a few inches of water, so we're slogging in the narrow streams between thick vegetable mash. It's not exactly dark because all the moons are out — Fraemauna, Sendala and Niminth. But it's not exactly light, either, and everything has three shadows. Water looks black, with ripples of yellow, blue and green, broken by our sloshes and by the shadows of the brush and trees. Not to mention it's muck under the water.

In our excitement, we walked quickly. Lenar led, something he doesn't do normally. We didn't really think too much of it at the time, but his excitement must have outpaced ours by several rivers. As Vic has said, he's a lonely, introverted guy who tagged along with us. Now, he was the leader of an expedition to actually do something other than clean up slabs of eviscerated turtle.

Given the light, the sucking mud, and the haste, it's no wonder Vic, never gracious in the best of times, stumbled and fell with a splash that woke most of the surrounding wildlife and sealed the fate of half our food.

Vic: I did not wake most of the wildlife! Only one flock of ducks launched when we stopped, and you don't know if that snake was asleep or not.

Lenar stopped and helped me up, because Vlad was too busy laughing at me. Lenar helped me clean most of the mud off because Vlad was realizing our food was destroyed. Lenar was an all around nice guy while my brother was a total goblin's end.

"We have to go back," Vlad said after we assessed the damages. "There's barely enough food for three days now."

"We'll ration," Lenar said.

"Ration? But I need to eat! I'm a growing boy!"

Lenar saw his eyes go to the turtle in the bucket. "Don't even think about it."

"I just may, if we start starving!"

"Look," I said, "they know we're gone by now. If we go back, we won't be able to leave again."

Back then, we thought being twins was why we seemed to be able to read each other's minds. Now, we know more, but what is important is that deep inside, Vlad and I understood that going back without doing something would be worse than starving. Looking at each other, we knew that this was probably our last great escapade, and afterward, we'd have to be civil and reasonable.

Vlad acquiesced. Obviously, or this story wouldn't be happening.

Vlad: So passed the daylong trek to what was generally considered the edge of the haunted region. There, we rested, until it was past midnight again. We ate rationed food, drank boiled water and argued about going in. Not much of an argument, really, because no one really wanted to go in while it was night. It's haunted, right?

At the edge of the region, you could just make out the weird moans of the spirits within. Those who had entered farther saw pulsating, colored lights at night. Not too much farther, and they felt the brush of ghosts against their skin. No one had gone beyond there.

Once, a man saw the band of dark things that must live in the region. He saw them from far off, but they were carrying the entrails of a giant lizard, he said, and laying them out along the ground. The man braved the ghosts and examined the lizard entrails, a long, thin tube of milky white material. Touching it brought a tingle as though the ghosts had grabbed him. The story goes that he fell asleep near the lizard guts, and woke twenty years later with scales, but that part must be a legend.

Vic: In the morning, rested, full of food, we three stared into the haunted region. The moans continued. Looking from Vlad to Lenar, I watched as Lenar straightened a little and walked into the region. Lenar, who always followed, now leading.

I met Vlad's eyes again, and again felt the connection. We followed the priest's son.

The brush gave way to the water. The trees grew into giants. The moss grew thick over the water and from the trees. Large tree fungus ringed the many dead trees, lying half-submerged in the water. The sky darkened under the canopy. The air stilled, and the bugs came out in numbers.

"Leeches," Vlad cursed, lifiting his boot from the knee-high water we slogged in. Two stuck to the boot.

"Don't fall down," I told him, and Lenar laughed a little.

Then the moaning began, a low, steady rise and fall, like, "Thum, thummmm, thum, thummmm."

Vlad: That's more like a heart beat. It was more, "ThummmuuUUMMuumm, thummmuuUUMMuumm."

Vic: Yes, putting in the letters for stress doesn't break it up as much. In any case, it was regular, it was eerie, and only Lenar kept walking.

"What is it, Lenar?" I asked.

He stopped, turned to us. "There's only one way to find out."

"Well, we'll wait here, and you find out and tell us, yah?" Vlad said.

"C'mon, guys," Lenar wheedled, meeting my eyes for once. "This is our adventure. The turtle is never wrong. We can't do this unless we all do it together." He gestured in the direction of the moaning. "It doesn't sound menacing. That would be more, ‘Argle, argle blah blach!'" He said the words with a tripping, lunging motion that nearly plunged him face first in the water.

I laughed. Vlad laughed.

"We'll sneak up on it, and then we'll decide what to do."

So we did.

Lenar: Once again, my work is interrupted to explain something these two old freaks cannot figure out. I am not sure if they realize how limited our time is. They are 79 years old. I am 82 years old. Most Seru might live to see 60 years old. We are freaks, however they object later when reading this. The artifact at the top of the tower was a shield generator and life-presence detector. The Kalkorae, the mede invasion force, left nothing to chance. They knew far more about us than we did about them. The shield protected the structure. I have found nothing about the Kalkorae or the medes in their homeland creating a shield to protect an entire region. The life-presence detector was the more important piece, because it gave the Kalkorae back in their fledgling city of Domus Palus information about any animals or plants within six miles of the tower. This implies that every six miles in an arc around the city, the Kalkorae had built a tower. You should know, though, that circles do not fit exactly. The medes were smart enough to overlap their presence detectors by placing the towers slightly less than six miles apart, and, and this is the most interesting part, put two inner rings of them, so that if all the towers were on the same line, they would only be two miles apart. Brilliant. I am still impressed at their foresight and their architectural capabilities. Please note, also, that the inner two rings were not simply shields and detectors. They also mounted weapons. Oh, Vlad is reminding me. The noise from the towers comes from the wind fans on their roofs. This is how the mede create magical energy, you see. They convert physical power into magical power. The applications, of course, are endless, and with an ocean, a running river, a regular breeze or a body of exercising people, magic is infinite.

Vic: We have told him what a paragraph mark is, and how to use it, but he's used to writing on paper, and because there is a limited supply to that, he doesn't believe in margins or paragraphs. It's enough to get him to not write in shorthand.

Vlad: The tower rose on four stilts cut from one tree. A small hut at the top of it sharpened into a pointed peak, from which a thinner but sturdier tower ascended up, over the trees, and became the wind fan. A ladder descended from the hut to a few feet above the water. Two thick, white cables — the storyteller's lizard intestine — followed the ladder down and then disappeared in the water.

It was obviously manmade, but we knew of no tribe who was this sophisticated. No tribe built structures this tall. No tribe built something that looked so fragile, yet was so sturdy. This was advanced engineering. We didn't even know what the wind fan was for, but we thought it was pretty.

Vic: Again, Vlad and I stopped, the turtle's bucket swaying, as Lenar moved forward, almost possessed.

He approached the tower, stopped and stared at it for awhile. Then he stepped forward, and we knew he was going for the ladder.

I'd like to say we told him to stop, but we didn't. We were dumbfounded. He was thinking too fast for us, as he always does. He wasn't thinking fast enough, though, and he rebounded against something with a yelled, "Ow!"

That's when we finally moved, but he was feeling at an invisible wall by the time we had crossed the clearing.

"It must be magic," Lenar said.

"Look, that's where the humming is coming from," Vlad said, pointing at the wind fan. "What do you think it does?"

"Who do you think built this?" I asked.

We both looked to Lenar, who was still staring at the space his hand was flattened against.

"Lenar?"

"What? Oh, the thing at the top of this tower? The wind is turning it, so I guess there's a rod being turned inside that hut. What an interesting idea. Do you see how ..."

"Let's use magic to get inside," Vlad said, all semblance of fear and caution gone now that we knew there were no ghosts in the haunted region.

"I don't know," Lenar said slowly. "Someone had to have built this. If they left a magic shield around it, who knows what else they left?"

"Well, if someone was here, they'd have seen us by now. Come on. We're far enough from home that they won't notice this."

Vlad: Our magic is community. We all sort of ... draw off each other. One person can do a little, two people can do more, three people can do a lot. It isn't just adding power too. The word Lenar once used was "non-linear," whatever that means. But two people working together can do far more than two people working separately trying to do the same thing. And three people do more than two, and so on.

Three of us should have been enough to level such a ridiculous structure.

Vic: We didn't make a dent. We didn't know what to target. Vlad aimed for the wall itself, and that resisted us. Lenar viewed the myst and saw the shield extended all the way around the tower, although the wind fan stuck out through it. The shield seemed to wrap tightly around the rod sticking up to the fan.

See, what we knew about magic at the time was that this shield wasn't possible. What we assumed was that there were at least three fully trained wints inside the tower, watching us. So I shouted at it.

"Hey! Is anyone there?"

"Shut up," Vlad muttered, turning his loose attack into a sharp point to try to make a hole in the wall.

"Someone must be up there, right?"

Well, in the end, no one was there. We exhausted ourselves in a pointless assault on a sentry tower. We retreated back to a tight copse of trees that offered some semblance of dry ground between them, and considered our situation.

"Tomorrow, I'm going to climb a tree and take out that thing at the top. Lenar says it's not within the shield," Vlad said.

"Do we really want to destroy it?" Lenar said. "We don't know what that wind fan does."

"Look, all I wanted was to see what was inside the tower, and it wouldn't let me," Vlad said, irrationally. "So now I'm going to do the next best thing. I'm going to chop the wind fan off near the top, and get it to the ground, and we'll look at it like that. If we have to go after the thing piece by piece, that's how we'll do it."

"It's a sophisticated piece of equipment!" Lenar said. "We can't just sacrifice it for your curiosity."

I looked down at the turtle, who was trying to climb the sides of its bucket but to no avail. I reached for the food stores, and the bag wasn't there.

"Hey, someone toss me the food," I interrupted them.

"What?" they said, looking at me.

"I thought you had it," Vlad said.

"I don't have it," Lenar said.

"I don't have it," I said.

"Well, that makes three of us," Vlad said, rising to his feet and throwing his hands up in the air. "Holy Seruvus, that's the last thing we need! I'm seriously gonna blow something up tomorrow!"

Vlad: Yeah, I was about that angry, Seruvus forgive me. You know how it feels. First you get stopped by a wall, then your sister loses all the rest of your food, then, just when you want to be irrational, someone comes at you with a rational argument that is correct, and that's not what you want at all. At all. There are words to describe my feelings at the time, but I don't know how to spell them.

So I shouted, "Sendala! Fraemauna! Niminth! You are all watching tonight! Blast this tower to shreds! Send us food! And stop dropping turtles on us!"

And Lenar, the voice of reason in the face of my rage, said, "Seruvus probably did the turtle."

Anger is irrational, so I giggled a bit and sarcastically screamed, "Marrish! Strike us down if Seruvus sent the turtle!"

We all waited. It was that kind of night. Something could happen. A crackling in the air made me jump, and my anger started to turn to fear.

"Marrish strike us down," I had said.

Luckily, he missed.

Vic: For the record, there were no clouds in the sky.

Vlad: Right. Cloudless sky, three moons in near full a few days after the new year. And lightning out of nowhere, slamming into the wind fan, setting it ablaze and shattering it.

I was freaked out. Vic was freaked out. Lenar was as placid as a turtle.

As our ears adjusted to silence once again, Lenar said, "What other signs do you need? Seruvus sent the turtle, which told us to come here. Marrish sends the lightning. He listened to your call. The gods need us to be here."

"Why?" Vic said, breathlessly.

Lenar shrugged. "The gods will reveal their will in due time.

"Sendala didn't bring the food," I said, sulkily but still shaken. It was a stupid thing to say.

"You can't expect everything to be provided for you."

Vic: Oh, Vlad could expect everything to be provided for him. The only thing he ever provided for himself, up that point, was his own adventures.

So it was somewhat shocking that an argument ensued over the edibility of our clothing, with Vlad in favor of boiling anything leather we had. After all, it's dead animal skin, he said, and we eat dead animals all the time.

Luckily, or perhaps not, the Kalkorae found us at that point.

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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