When people hear about a lone tower in the wilderness, their minds immediately jump to the wizard towers of old, majestic constructions by humans that didn’t need shades to thrive in our world. No two were alike. That was the essence of wizardry that separated it from modern Crafting. Each one had to find their own path or learn from a tradition started by one who did. The designs, theories, and magical script varied wildly from tower to tower. Some hosted whole communities, while others catered to the needs of a singular master and their apprentice.

  Inevitably, these all failed. No one can stand alone against the monsters and such individualistic behaviors are pointless for someone without a shade to grow. Yet, a few holdouts clung to the old ways rather than retreat into the upper city of Last Stand.

  While there are other kinds of towers, the one we had been sent to clear was a proper wizard tower. The metal construction stretched twenty stories into the sky like a giant bulbous tree. It’s bronze branches extended to ovoid chambers covered in grass and windows. The branches turned gently with the wind and circled the central spire. Invisible chimes shook with the motions and played pleasant sounds that only my shade could hear. A calm carried on the note and attempted to lower my alertness. You don’t have to defend against monsters that leave you alone. Several large rents in the tower evidenced that the deterrent wasn’t enough.

  My team stood at its base by a set of double doors as I carefully examined the entrance. “The lingering defenses of a tower can be more dangerous than the monsters lurking within. While the locals know where all the traps are, we don’t. They’ll use that against us if they can. We’ll have to crawl through every centimeter to avoid—”

  “Ooor you could take control of the security system.” Nyla approached the door.

  “That would be ideal, but—”

  Nyla stuck her eye over a scanner by the door. A blue light then shone above the entrance as it slid open, and an automated feminine voice said, “Welcome.”

  “How did you do that?” I had never heard of anyone hacking systems like these.

  She rested a hand by the opening and slumped. “I used to live here…”

  Oh… Rick you bastard. The yawning abyss within Nyla grew as she stared at the once familiar entryway and felt nothing. That void in her heart had consumed any nostalgia she might’ve had, and the pain of longing couldn’t disturb her baseline emptiness. Realizing this deadening of feeling causes an abstract pain. It’s another sign that the end is coming, but you don’t know how to stop it because with each revelation, you’re bothered by it less. When I denied myself, I unraveled until only my heroic heart sustained me. Nyla didn’t even have that. She pulled on the rest of us through Riena’s bond and buoyed herself on our emotions.

  “Welcome to la casa de… No, it’s best to leave that name to the ashes of the crematorium. I’m only Nyla now.” We followed her inside. “Don’t worry about tracking in dirt. The rug is self-cleaning. Feel free to admire the artwork. All are pieces from the family. Those stairs lead down into the basement. It’s supposed to be monster infested, so there’s no reason to clear that out. I’ve marked all of you as guests, so our wondrous—and not completely fucking useless—defenses don’t fry you.”

  Riena stared at Nyla until our Vanguard grew irritated. “Alright, this place is huge and we only have a day to clear it if we don’t want to miss classes. We’ll split up to cover more ground. Nyla and Mari, clear the priority areas.” Meaning wherever Nyla wanted to visit. “Vanya, watch Casimir’s back as he—” Our Healer’s hackles rose. “I’m sorry, Cas, is there a problem?”

  He grimaced. “Look, I’m not the most comfortable with elves. All the ones I’ve known have tried to kill me or people I care about. I get that Vanya is different—intellectually—but that doesn’t change how I feel.”

  Vanya rolled her eyes. “You too? I thought Mari’s experience with elves was the exception.”

  “It’s…” Derek sighed. “The most insane elves walk out of the woods and settle in an outer district to ‘prove themselves’. After enough good behavior and contributions, they are allowed to move more inward. Over time, nearly all the elves that want to work with humans live in the middle, inner, or upper city. Those elves then reincarnate within those same families. There just aren’t a lot of law-abiding elves living around the refugees. The few that are tend to also get rounded up by inquisitors. Most of them have no standards because killing any elf they can usually kills a ‘bad’ one and saves lives. When those elves come back, they generally have a bone to pick with humanity.”

  Nyla nodded along. “Yeah, I’ve lost friends to elves. I don’t know why we keep letting crazies settle with us.”

  “Trade with the elves provides materials for better equipment, more drones, and tighter security,” I offered. “On the balance, the gains save more lives than local elves kill.” Absolute gave the explanation to all the named after a high tier raid more than once. Continued association with elves remained controversial.

  “Ah, poor people as fodder to better secure rich people. That tracks.”

  Riena rubbed her temples. “Casimir, I need you to deal, and you know why.”

  He held up his hands. “I didn’t say anything. You’re making the optimal pairs: Crafter/Vanguard, Healer/Crafter, Guardian/Commander. It makes sense to split up the Crafters. The double Vanguards will work better together and you don’t need Derek and I’s battlefield control on the same pair. I’m not so out of practice Commanding to miss the basics.”

  “Sooo glad I could be included in this team bonding,” Vanya lied.

  We went our separate ways and prowled for inhabitants. Nyla opened empty room after empty room to growing frustration. “Where are the fucking monsters!?”

  “This is perfectly normal,” I responded. “Your average tower is mainly monsterless rooms and traps. A few clever creatures will figure out how to safely roam, but most find a quiescent corner and siphon what resources they can before moving on. Normally, that’s compensated by looting whatever lingering treasure remains, but…”

  “What? If you find something interesting, grab it. Lot of good this shit has done me sitting out here for three years.”

  “Wait… I thought you grew up with little food.” We were surrounded by wealth.

  She opened another door and slammed the empty room shut. “The hydroponics garden broke a generation back. Stripping the MP from foraged food takes a lot of effort, so we mainly traded with Last Stand. Those shipments weren’t the most reliable.” Nyla paused in front of a painting depicting a family of four with dark skin and curly hair. The father had glasses and a beard. He wore a burgundy sweater vest and dress shirt under billowing black robes lined with intricate enchantments. His wife and two daughters had similarly lavish robes over regular clothing. They were all caught in a moment of genuine mirth. “Rich, but food insecure. Powerful, but could die to common monsters. Modern Crafters, but old traditions. My family was a mix of contradictions, but we made it work… until we didn’t.”

  I squeezed her shoulder. “All of us refugees had parents with dreams outside of Last Stand. They say none are left now. There is only one city, one humanity to hold the tide against the horde. I don’t begrudge the dreamers. They tried to survive in their own way and paid the ultimate price.”

  She shrugged off my hand. “It doesn’t matter.” The bond snapped with too much distance from Riena. Nyla closed her eyes and opened dead ones before casually unlocking the next door. Inside was a beautiful room with easels supporting half-painted canvases, half finished sculptures, dry clay on spinning wheels, a desk with dozens of sketches, and a messy bed. “My sister wanted to be an artist. Imagine that?”

  “Many heroes take up art as a hobby. Power is well known for his lesbian romance novels, and Eviscerate’s singles are popular earworms. Even Absolute plays the violin, though not publicly.” After a particularly costly raid, she would get drunk and play for the stars. During one of those benders, she rambled about wanting to be an astronaut as a little girl. “Art is a powerful outlet.”

  “No, my sister wanted to be a full-time artist. As in, she didn’t want to do anything else.”

  I resisted the urge to laugh. “A life devoted to a leisure activity? Even an opulent shadeless upper-city Crafter has to spend most of the day commanding their drones and factories. The struggles of the rear are as ceaseless as the front.” Occasionally, a leech would try to make their living through owning without adding any expertise. Most wouldn’t get very far because the people they stole from had a duty to stop such sabotage. The Hero Union disposed of the rest.

  Nyla brushed a hand over a stone wolf’s head. “It seems like a crazy dream now, but my parents wanted to make it possible for her. They wanted both of us to have whatever we wanted.” She then grabbed the bust and flung it at the chthonic on the bronze ceiling. The horned shadowy creature flowed around the attack and hissed at Nyla before lunging.

  She burst into white soul-destroying flames and slashed it in half with her sword. The creature screamed, summoning more of it’s ilk from shadows and vents. Chthonics fed on death and could survive anywhere people had died, but had trouble with sunlight. They were also fully sapient and had their own demonic culture.

  I summoned my old tier 2 shrieker teeth glaive and chitin armor set to drain the vitality of these monsters. Direct physical attacks were basically useless, and unlike spirits, chthonics had none of the regular weaknesses to silver or magic weapons. I stabbed into the maw of a goat-headed demon and drained it dry as it flailed helplessly at my armor. Despite being insubstantial, the creatures only attacked physically until the higher tiers.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Nyla dueled with a couple mid tier variants while I circled the edge of the battlefield and picked off the low tier stragglers until my glaive and armor were fed enough to handle stronger foes.

  After a whirlwind cleave through a group of them, a chthonic with an ox’s face and bulk dove at me with all four claws reaching. I twirled and removed three of the creature’s limbs. Before they could flow back to it, I jammed my glaive into a wound and Exemplified the Drain Life property with my aura. The creature collapsed into my glaive, and I staggered from the effort. A neat, but costly trick.

  When I turned to Nyla, she had the last two gripped by their horns. Flames pumped from her hands into the beast until they exploded and covered her with gore that faded to nothing after a few seconds. Nyla panted from the effort and glared around the now destroyed room. All her dead sister’s half completed dreams lay in ruins. My Vanguard’s hands clenched and shook. Her face locked into a grimace as her eyes wetted before she stormed out of the room and screamed.

  I calmly collected the chthonic horns before joining her. She led the way without a word. For hours, we searched empty rooms and obliterated the occasional low-tier monster. This lasted until Nyla stopped in front of a room that we had walked past several times. She took a steadying breath and slid it open. The bedroom had an alchemy station, basic forging supplies, a small stack of magical script references, and a large workbench with the beginnings of a low tier drone. The shelves were filled with magical items up to tier 3. Nyla froze in the center of the room as I examined the contents.

  “Oh, some of these are quite good. Nyla, I didn’t know you could Craft,” I said.

  She turned toward an orb playing the same images of nature on repeat. “Barely, I always used materials one or two tiers higher than what I made.” A red flame enveloped her right hand as she showed it to me. “Raised a Crafter, but given a Vanguard power. One more contradiction for the last member of this family.” She sighed. “When I got to Last Stand, I didn’t have the luxury of a hobby. You know how the training schools are in the outer districts. I had to kill and slaughter every day to survive. What use is any of this bullshit compared to my flames?”

  “For those that can only master so much, it is generally a better use of time to focus on your main ability rather than branching out to unpowered Crafting.”

  Nyla extinguished her flame and walked through the crypt of her old life. “I was hoping my second ability would be related to Crafting or Exemplar, but… instead I get bombs. I’m stuck in this role, a useful tool for killing things until I finally die.”

  “Most would tell you that there is a life beyond heroics; that you need to find joy in the quiet moments and define yourself outside your duty. But I’ve always wondered, why? This world is filled with endless adventure and meaningful work. Each of us is born with a righteous purpose, and recently, the future is full of hope.”

  “Is it?” She gestured around the room. “I grew up believing that if I studied hard and did what I was told, I would get a life as good or better than my parents. Last Stand could flourish, but I’ll still be elbow deep in monster guts. We won’t purge them in my lifetime. I’ll be expected to do my part like a good little cog, twisting until I break down and thanking my masters for their oil.” Fires flickered through her hair. “I hate it. I hate the monsters. I hate this world. Everything is so ugly. It won’t get better for me.”

  “Have you tried drugs?”

  “The fuck?”

  “You’re in what I call a ‘death spiral’. Many such individuals improve with medication—not all—but many.”

  “How does anything I said change if I’m on happy pills!?”

  “Well, you could be having fun. What’s the difference between that and living vicariously through the team’s emotions? If you’re chasing oblivion, then what’s the harm in giving the old noggin a shakeup? I’ve tried giving people speeches when they are like this, and it doesn’t last. Humans are meant to adapt to their circumstances and find contentment, no matter how awful things are. If you can’t, then you have a medical condition.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You sound like Casimir.”

  “Our Healer would know!” I spread my arms in frustration. There was little I could do about what was trying to kill Nyla. She would have to save herself.

  “Can we finish this and get out of here?” She waved at the room. “Take anything you want. It’s not mine anymore, and I’m not gonna use it.”

  I did take the time to gather Nyla’s possessions. She might not want them today, but she might in the future.

  We continued up clearing the tower and slew more miscellaneous monsters. Nyla threw herself bodily against each foe and didn’t burn off the resulting mess. Blood trailed behind her as she shuffled from room to room, a vacant expression in eyes and no words on her lips. I joined her in silence. We didn’t need to communicate as we purged this place of monsters.

  Nyla lingered at another door before entering. This one had a majestic canopy bed with blue sparkling curtains on a stone plinth surrounded by a moat of books. Beyond the moat, the shelves lining the room were bursting with tomes. Nyla walked to the stone dock and lit a candle. One of the plants drooped down and dropped a seed, which grew into a lily pad that floated over the books. “Come on. This will take us around the room.”

  I stepped on it with her. The books began to ‘flow’ like an actual river and carried our platform with it.

  “Generations back, we used to keep the library on the top floor, but we heard of several towers falling to greedy dragons raiding such an exposed portion, so we left our tomes more distributed. The parents kept a lot of their favorites here, but we had more than a few repositories.” Her words were monotone and mechanical. Motes of light then wafted up from the river and provided illumination. Nyla tapped one of them. “Father would read my sister and I bedtime stories as the boat rocked us to sleep. Mom preferred the bed or a couch. I… miss them.”

  “They sound like a wonderful family.” I reached down and pulled a book from the river. It was an accurate fairy tale.

  “They were…”

  When we reached the center island, the bed’s blankets stirred. A rumbling yawn reverberated through my bones as an orange snout peaked from under the covers. It continued extending and exposed an entire draconic face. Groggy slitted eyes slowly blinked both their inner and outer eyelids at us. The creature angled his head to the left and then to the right as though to confirm we weren’t an optical illusion or comely stacked books. He shook his and pulled a pair of round glasses from an extradimensional space and placed them over his eyes. The arms of the frames hooked around his horns like ears.

  During this motion, the blanket fell away to reveal the dragon’s obesity. He sat on the bed like a throne and addressed us, “It seems I have uninvited guests. How did you sneak past the—” His glasses flashed. “Ah, if it isn’t Nyla, last of the Aphiwe clan. I’m afraid this demesne is no longer yours. You have not fulfilled your family’s obligations, and I have claimed it as our agreement specified.”

  Violet flames sparked around Nyla as she shook with fury and demanded, “The fuck are you talking about? What agreement?”

  “Your ancestors borrowed a book from my library and have been paying late fees ever since. You lapsed in the payments, and I have come to collect.”

  I held her back. Antagonizing a dragon wasn’t the wisest move. While this one didn’t warp reality with his very presence like a high tier dragon, he could still be tier 6, far beyond what I thought this team was ready for. We could win, but not without casualties. How to get Riena here? A sphere flickered in my vision as one of our Commander’s cloaked drones zipped out of the room. So she was watching us.

  With that problem solved, I shifted my stance to better defend Nyla from a sudden attack. Few appreciated how fast a dragon could be when they wanted to. That combined with their might and inherent spellcasting made for a formidable combo. Additionally, the difference between tier 6 and tier 7 was more esoteric than raw strength and speed. All high tier monsters were virtually invincible and had mitigated whatever weaknesses they might have to the point of irrelevancy. This dragon could be more dangerous than creatures I’ve raided with the other named heroes.

  “Bullshit,” Nyla growled. “I never heard about this agreement.”

  The dragon laughed. My knees weakened at the sound as my shade involuntarily quivered. This creature was death. When his mirth faded, he retracted his presence and appeared as nothing more than an enthusiastic bookwyrm. “For reasons I cannot comprehend, your family was ashamed of our arrangement and only the matriarch or patriarch knew of it. Your own father was especially cordial. Alas, all his plans and dreams collapsed to a hungry wyvern. Such is a human’s lot.”

  As Nyla attempted to contain her fury, I coughed and interjected, “Sir dragon, hu—”

  “Please, call me Dalbod.”

  “Dalbod, humanity wishes to reclaim this tower for its glorious expansion efforts. If this is now your place of residence, would you be amicable to a trade?” I signed along with the draconic version of my words.

  The creature’s eyes widened a little at my mastery. He signed back excitement at my understanding and requested I not interfere. “Perhaps. But what could you offer me?” His eyes swung back to Nyla. “How about you, little wizard? Would you renew your family’s pact with me to regain your tower?”

  She rolled her eyes. “This tower will never be mine. I’m not going to pay you tribute for the rest of my life so that other people can squat in it.”

  “Ha! That wouldn’t be appealing, would it?” The dragon rubbed his chin and hummed. “Perhaps an older arrangement would satisfy you, one I offered to the first Aphiwe: each month, you will give me one book that I do not own. Should you fail, I’ll claim you and take you back to my lair. In return, I’ll leave this tower and loan you one book a month to improve your magic. The tome will be in line with your current skill level and understandable to your mortal mind.”

  Nyla emptied her pockets. “I don’t got any books.”

  “You’ll have a month to acquire one. My collection is vast, but it can’t include literature from newly connected worlds. Surely, you explore portals enough to offer sufficient recompense?”

  My Vanguard wasn’t entirely convinced.

  “It’s either this or fail your mission. I won’t be done perusing your father’s collection for some time, and I’m not nearly so tolerant of human interlopers as some of my kin. Choose little wizard. My offer will only be extended so long.”

  Riena entered with the rest of the team and reestablished the bond. I gestured for them to stay on the dock. They paused as we all felt an unexpected emotion kindle in Nyla: hope. She burned with longing for the life she lost, and this dragon offered a sliver of it through knowledge and guided tutoring. That longing warred with her fierce hatred of all monsters and a deep distrust for any deal they offered. Under that battle, the abyss consuming her offered a devil-may-care attitude to risk. Nyla would never trust Dalbod, but she also didn’t mind if this deal ended her.

  The longing won. An ounce of hope will triumph over any hatred. Decision made, our Vanguard stood taller, “On my name, I, Nyla Aphiwe, accept this pact.”

  Dalbod’s grin showed all his teeth. He slit a claw over his right palm and extended it to her. “Let us seal it in blood.”

  Dragons were one of the few monsters to share red blood with humans, but theirs was a truer, more vibrant red. No one could mistake it for the flimsy juice humans produced. A single drop could overpower a human’s system and replace it, which granted a variety of benefits at the cost of being more susceptible to the will of whatever dragon donated the drop. Even with a benign benefactor, the blood would whisper to a hero, always tempting them to exchange more humanity for more power. Heroes as strong as Nyla could resist, but it would be a constant struggle for the rest of her days.

  Our Vanguard knew all this and didn’t care. She cut her palm on her sword and shook Dalbod’s hand.

  The dragon cackled and flapped into the air, destroying the canopy above him. “I’ll be in touch.” Space wrinkled around him, and with a pop, he disappeared along with all the books.

  Nyla stared at her torn hand. Under the pain and worry about what she just did, her ember of hope burned brightly.