Consciousness fluttered around Sorin’s mind, gently caressing it as it slowly drew him awake. Long years of climbing kept him still and his breathing steady. His eyes remained closed, giving no indication that he’d regained awareness of the world around him. Blind Sense—he was really coming to love that soulprint—painted the picture for him.

  He was still in the forest, in a circle of trees some thirty feet across. River trolls stood over him, two of them. A half dozen other monsters stood or crouched at the tree line. Sorin counted another troll, a pair of huge birds, and three hagris. Other, hazier outlines were in the trees themselves, either still enough or far enough away that he couldn’t get a clear picture of what they were.

  None of them were important. Oh, he was completely fucked if and when they decided to attack. The two trolls flanking him would have been enough to ruin his day considering his position on the ground with no weapon. But the real problem was the three humanoid figures gathered together on the far side of the glade.

  Three witches? How typical.

  The weird part was that they hadn’t killed him yet, but in Sorin’s experience, that was never a good thing. It usually just meant they wanted a fresh corpse for whatever they had planned. He didn’t see the rest of his team anywhere, which unfortunately meant they were almost certainly dead.

  A small pang went through his chest as he realized that. He hadn’t known them long, and none of them had been exceptional, but he’d grown to like them. They were his only friends, if they could be called that, in this new tower.

  That pang vanished, replaced by simmering anger. He’d held back a lot over the past few weeks. Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe if he’d gone all out, things wouldn’t have ended like this. Maybe if he’d spent more time on himself and less time carrying a group of fresh climbers, he’d have already reached rank 4 or 5.

  If only… But it’s too late for that now.

  He didn’t see himself killing close to a dozen monsters while lying on his back with only one good arm. The witches were the priority, though. They had to die, and then he had to run. That was the only way he was going to live to see the sun come up in the morning.

  “The champion wakes,” one of the witches croaked.

  “For many moments now,” another responded.

  “Give it time,” the third said. “This situation is strange to us all.”

  “Peh,” the first one spat out.

  “Chosen, we are. Divine emissaries.”

  “So tell it the words and be done with this,” the first said.

  That’s… new. Is this more tower bullshittery related to my relocation?

  “Help the champion up,” the third witch said, or at least Sorin thought it was the third witch. They all sounded the exact same, and it was only by paying attention to their mouths moving with Blind Sense that he could keep track of who was speaking.

  Before he could flinch away, both river trolls reached down to grab hold of his arm and pull him to his feet. Fortunately, their hands circled around his biceps and not the part of his arm that had healed poorly from being twisted backward. The real surprise, however, was that once he was upright, they let go.

  “Well, I’ve got to say that this is a new one for me,” he told the witches. “Not the kidnapping part, but the treatment after.”

  “We feel the same,” the first witch grumbled. “It is one thing to play with our food, but this…”

  “The Creator demands. In this, as all things, we serve,” the third witch said.

  Snippets of old lectures came back to Sorin. The tower monsters, those that were sapient, at least, universally worshipped a being they knew as the Creator. In some monster societies, that being had other names, but regardless of what they called it, it was understood to be the tower and their god.

  Whether they were right or not was still a mystery. It wasn’t like God was coming down from Heaven to clear things up for anyone, so it was hard for Sorin to argue against humans who believed that monsters had things figured out. More importantly, he didn’t care.

  What mattered right now wasn’t whether the tower was actually a god, or God, or whatever. No, the important thing to focus on was that the tower itself apparently had a message for him, and it had arranged for a trio of witches to fucking kidnap him in order to make him hear it.

  Anger flared anew in his chest. You weren’t enough of a bastard already? You had to target my team, too? Are they dead yet, or are the witches keeping them alive to chop up later?

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  “What do you want?” Sorin asked, trying to rein in his fury.

  The three witches stood in front of him, not ten feet away. There were no monsters between them. He’d never get a better shot at killing them.

  “The calamity spreads,” the first witch intoned.

  The second added, “Darkening void encroaches.”

  “Hold to your oath,” said the third.

  “The way becomes corrupted.”

  “Champion of Light.”

  “Memories broken and forged anew.”

  Their voices harmonized, overlapping each other until all three were speaking in unison. Sorin faltered, confused and almost overwhelmed by the resonance. It wasn’t just the three witches speaking; it was the tower itself.

  Something weighed down on Sorin, something as ancient and powerful as anything he’d encountered in his old life. In some ways, it was worse. With all the intensity of the most powerful demon or eldritch being, it was somehow all encompassing. Rather than a simple physical pressure—though it was also that—Sorin felt it in his soulspace. He staggered, and he wasn’t the only one.

  The full weight of the tower’s attention dropped the monsters to their knees. Some struggled to climb back upright; others willingly prostrated themselves. Only the trio of witches remained on their feet, and all three of them had faces contorted in incredible pain. Light streamed out of their eyes, their mouths, their ears and noses. It shifted from red to orange to yellow, going all the way down the spectrum and back up again. When it reached indigo, strands of darkness twined through it, only to vanish as the color blurred again.

  Well, that’s probably not good. But I already knew about this.

  Sorin recalled the seven towers he’d seen and how one of them had micro-fractures of void black running through it. It had been the same color. Something was off about that tower, and getting messages with words like “calamity,” “darkening void,” and “corruption” probably wasn’t a good sign.

  What the ever-loving fuck have I gotten myself into?

  The tower’s awareness vanished as abruptly as it had appeared. Only pure, stubborn, contrary willpower kept Sorin from collapsing to the ground, and that was more than he could say for the monsters around him. If ever there was a chance to slaughter the witches, this was it.

  Except, he couldn’t do it. When he tried to reach into his soulspace for the anima needed to form an ice blade, nothing happened. He wasn’t tired. He wasn’t out of anima. He just… couldn’t access it for some reason.

  “The words have been spoken,” one of the witches gasped out.

  “Our task is complete. The sight of this one sickens me. If we cannot crush it, let us leave,” the cranky one announced.

  Slowly, the monster procession got moving. They marched out of the circle of trees, not bothering to so much as look at Sorin. The witches were the last to go, two of them vanishing into the darkness. The final one halted at the tree line and looked back.

  “The Creator willed this. It demanded you be told the words. When the sun rises, natural order resumes.”

  “What—”

  But before he could even finish formulating the question, the witch walked away. It was only once she vanished that he realized Blind Sense wasn’t feeding him information. The strength and endurance he’d grown accustomed to over the last week was also gone.

  Did… Did the tower somehow turn off soulprints? How the fuck…? Is that what the witch meant about the natural order resuming at dawn?

  It was all too much to deal with. Sorin pushed everything to the back of his mind for the moment and refocused on his more immediate problems. He was somewhere in the Witch Wood, and he had no clue where. It was dark, and without Blind Sense, he was going to have a tough time navigating. It seemed like he had a small window to escape before the sun came up, then all bets were off.

  The first thing to do was find his camp and reclaim his weapon. He’d also need supplies. A small sliver of him hoped against hope that he’d find the rest of his team still alive. In any normal situation, it was an impossibility. This time, though, that slim chance existed. And if they were gone, he’d do his best to avenge them.

  But the tower reclaimed anything left unattended for long enough, and that meant one way or another, he needed to find his gear. Once he made it to camp, he’d reassess and decide his next moves.

  The woods around him were unfamiliar, but working on the theory that he’d been carried to the heart of the Witch Wood, he started walking south and east. It didn’t take long for him to start coming across streams, and from there, he eventually found his way to one he recognized. Following that got him back to the hunting grounds his team had been walking for the last few days.

  He didn’t run across a single monster the entire time, which he would have said was a statistical impossibility any other night. The tower had empowered its witches with that extreme sleep spell and given them far too many minions in order to ensure Sorin was dragged to the heart of the forest to hear its message, but it didn’t play fair. It could be a fatal mistake to assume it would let him leave uncontested.

  But that was exactly what happened. Sorin reached the camp about an hour before dawn, only to find Rue and Nemari still in their sleeping bags and Odric laid out on the ground next to his seat. His sword was right where he’d dropped it, and other than the fire having burnt out, it was like nothing had ever happened.

  The footprints in the dirt put the lie to that, but the witch’s blood from where he’d struck it was gone. Sorin wasn’t sure what, if anything, that meant, but he had more important things to dwell on, so he struck it from his mind.

  Finding his team alive and unharmed was practically a miracle. It did, however, raise the awkward question of how much to tell them. All the reasons he’d had to keep his secrets still held true. Part of him wanted to trust them, and with Samael also being from outside the red tower, he supposed there was less incentive to hide everything, but he still hesitated.

  No taking it back once you tell them, Sorin reminded himself.

  But they were all outcasts now, at least until the Black Hellion situation was resolved. By the time that happened, he’d be strong enough to fend for himself. The real question was whether or not telling them changed anything. And the answer to that still felt like a resounding no to him. The team couldn’t help him do anything but climb, and they didn’t need to know about all the tower shit to do that.

  But do they deserve to know? They’re in danger if they climb with me. Tonight proves that beyond a doubt. Maybe they’d be better off without me.

  Samael probably wouldn’t even care about the rest of them once he learned Sorin had cut them loose. If Rue could get up to rank 4 or 5, she could defend herself from her handler. But no, that was foolishly optimistic. Even if she killed Raf, that might not get her away from the Hellions.

  The sun came up, and Sorin still hadn’t found any answers.