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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/TheMaskedOne2807 on 2024-11-01 14:45:12+00:00.

Book 1: (Desperate to save his son Kenneth, a calm and nonviolent doctor accepts a deal offered to him by a strange creature. However, the price he must pay is to abandon everything he holds dear: his wife, children, and world as he attempts to share his knowledge of healing and medicine in a world entrenched by violence. Yet, in such a place, how long can his nonviolent nature remain if he wishes to survive?)

***

“-LP!”

With a heavy and dull thud, Kenneth hit the ground.

Heart racing, gasping, and lying on the ground, all he was met with as he desperately and disorientedly looked around was white.

Nothing but white as far as the eye could see.

The only thing convincing him he wasn’t floating in some sort of void or was dead was the reassuring and familiar feeling of the hard floor he was currently on.

‘What the…! Was I just eaten?!’ Kenneth internally questioned as he quickly got on his feet and began walking.

‘Okay, think. This… has to be a dream, right?! Kenneth thought to himself, the words somewhat drowning the continuous thumping of his beating heart. ‘Yes! Yes! This is just Ja–!’

Suddenly, he stumped his foot against the white void.

‘What the–?! I… I felt that. Nervously, he inspected what lied ahead of him, feeling a hard, cold, and smooth surface. He knocked on it a time or two, hearing only a dull thud, ‘…Is this a wall?’

His question was soon answered as his hand traced a bit more to the right, and he felt a change in the flat surface. It suddenly bent at an angle as if that point was where the walls met.  

‘Is this a room? Kenneth wondered as he began walking, his hand tracing along the wall slightly, changing his direction when the wall would bend at an angle.

While walking, he tried to make sense of the situation. ‘Okay, think. Why did this happen? All I did was touch the tower. Hundreds, if not thousands, have done so as well, so why did this happen to me? I mean, Trafka hit the damn thing with a hammer, and it remained as solid as stone.’

As he continued walking for some time, he began to feel unwell, gaining a headache and a bit of nausea.

Being a doctor, any multitude of potential ailments and diseases popped into his head, but real life was far from being an episode of “House”, and the most probable cause was the most likely reason.   

He popped off one of his shoes and began to walk again with his hand sliding along the wall. Keeping a keen eye on it, it quickly became apparent he was trapped in a hexagon-shaped white room. 

Putting his shoe back on, Kenneth thought, ‘So I’m in the tower… well, that should have been obvious from the get-go, but still… this is surreal… am I really awake? I mean, if I’m really inside the tower, the walls can’t be more than one or two meters thick. That’s impossible. The base should have crumbled under its own weight.

‘But then again, the tower should have fallen long ago due to winds, but it hasn’t for… well, who knows how long… dammit it, this is giving me a headache…’

Scratching the back of  his head, Kenneth wasn’t sure what to make of it all, and as a looming sense of dread began to rear its ugly head, he remembered something Ikkie said, “once the tower took its vengeance, all that was left of him was his spear.”

‘Wait, was that what happened to him? Kenneth wondered. ‘But he attacked and damaged the tower… all I did was touch it… would that be enough to provoke it?’

Kenneth had a mountain of questions, but he had no answers.

The sad reality was he was stuck inside the tower. Even if he called for help and those outside could hear him, there wasn’t any way for them to get him out; the weaponry at the base proved that fact.

Sighing, Kenneth crossed his arms and leaned his back against the wall. He expected to feel a gentle bump; instead, he felt a falling sensation and reflexively backpedalled to avoid falling.  

However, it did little to change the outcome, not from lack of balance but by the sudden appearance, right before his eyes, of a giant white Nok with its maw open.

‘What the hell?!’ Kenneth thought, his heart once again racing at full throttle as he hit the ground and scooted away until his back slammed against a wall.

Trapped, Kenneth stopped, taking a moment to calm himself after the sudden shock as he realized it wasn’t a Nok the had suddenly appeared right in front of him, but a statue of one that missed it’s lower body and briefly rippled.

‘Okay, what the actual fuck?! Kenneth screamed in his head. ‘Did I just pass through the wall… again! And…! And…! And what the hell with a statue all of a suddennnnn…!’

His thought’s coming to a halt; Kenneth was completely and utterly shocked to see that the statue before him wasn’t the only one of its kind.

Beside it and beside him was a multitude of others, not just Nok but Sil as well, all in different poses and positions with different parts of their bodies missing.

Some, like the one before him, protruded from the wall, others sprouted from the floor like plants, and lastly, there were those that simply hung from the ceiling like chandeliers.

‘This officially went from creepy to terrifying,’ Kenneth thought as his gut turned to ice.

Getting to his feet, he scanned his new surroundings.  

No longer was he stuck in a hexagon-shaped room, as he now found himself in a corridor stretching as far as the eye could see in both directions, with no end in sight of statues and sculpted body parts.

Strangely, there was a lack of Aki statues for some reason.

‘Okay, screw this! I need to find a way out!’ Kenneth thought as he picked a direction and hurriedly walked down it.

His steps echoed while a sensation of dread continuously loomed over him like the lower body of a Sil ahead of him; he ducked under while getting a look underneath, noticing a distinctive cavity of sorts in the centre.

 He was used to eyes lingering on him, but the statues, those that head heads, were different. He had the irrational fear one of them would suddenly come to life and grab him.

‘What am I even thinking? That sort of stuff only happens in horror movies,’ Kenneth thought, ignoring the irrational fear and focusing on the path ahead.

Though it certainly didn’t help that each and every one of the statues was so… meticulously crafted, so detailed, so… life-like.  

Weaving his way through the statues all around him, Kenneth began occupying his attention with questions he knew probably wouldn’t be answered, ‘Why could I suddenly pass through that wall like with the outside of the tower?

‘I mean, I touched it before, but it was solid, and it wasn’t even because I just touched it with my back; I hit another wall with it right after I fell, and it stayed solid. Maybe it’s only certain walls I can do it with, or maybe there’s no rhyme or reason… it just happens when it happens?’

Letting out a sigh, Kenneth took a wide step over a slim sideways-lying Nok on the floor but failed to see the tip of its tail poking up a bit ahead, making him stumble.

Grabbing onto the nearest thing, Kenneth steadied himself, but as he looked at what he was holding onto, he was a bit surprised to see it was a statue of an Aki, most of its body fully rendered in stone or whatever the material comprised the walls within the tower was.

He looked at it for a bit, feeling a strange sense of Deja Vu, ‘Now, why is this the only Aki? There are so many Nok and Sil, but only one Aki. Will I find more if I go further, ahea…?’

Suddenly, his thoughts came to a halt once more as he spotted something moving out of the corner of his eye.

He quickly turned his head to make sure it wasn’t just a figment of his imagination, and past the sea of statues and sculpted body parts, he spotted a contrasting black figure.  

It was too far away, and there was too much in his line of sight to get a proper look, but he was sure it was there.

He straightened his back and slowly began walking toward whatever the distant figure was, all the while feeling twitches of hesitation pulse throughout his body.  

‘Should I just walk up to whoever that is and say hi? Kenneth asked himself. ‘Well, it’s not like I’ve got a lot of other choices. I just have to hope whoever or whatever that figure is is potentially friendly.’

Taking a deep breath, he decided to call out to the figure, “Hey you ther–!”

“ARRRGGG!” Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a torturous pain erupted, emanating from Kenneth’s skull. It felt as though it was being ripped open from the inside out.

He grabbed his head with his right hand and looked to see the figure in the distance was gone.

“Wai-- ARRRGG!!!” The pain intensified, and he could barely contain his screams of agony as he staggered forward and lost his footing, hitting his head against one of the statues, but compared to the pain he felt, it was little more than a bug bite as he writhed on hands and knees screaming.

Yet unbeknownst to him, his screams outside of his mask were silent like the sea when it was dead calm.

He was barely able to keep his eyes open, and what little he was able to see was blurred by tears welling up, but even so, Kenneth managed to glimpse something while he was looking down. The floor that once had been as pure white as ivory was now darkening, becoming brown and green.

Yet Kenneth barely noticed this, the intolerable pain overshadowing any other thought.

But as suddenly as the pain in his head had appeared, it suddenly went away, leaving …

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