The Green Tower

As the storm of ash settles around you, you catch your first glimpse of the palace. Your withered steed staggers on along the brittle causeway of grey sand, following an almost imperceptible depression winding through the wasteland. This endless desert is composed of the desolation that awaits all things, every grain the abraded ruins of great cities, disintegrated war machines, bones smashed to powder.

It is difficult to go on. You are tired. You do not know how far you have travelled. You do not remember your homeland, whence you set off many years before. Your memories have been leached from you by the landscape, forfeited as payment for a chance to tread the halls of the palace. The tower of blackish green erupts from the wilderness, piercing the constant blanket of cloud, mocking any sense of perspective or proportion.

It is the last palace. You knew its name, once. You heard it on the dying breath of a madman in a flophouse doorway. It was the peal of an opaline bell, the shrill whistle of an obscene flute. You tried to copy him but the syllables felt wrong in your mouth, as if your anatomy was unsuited to the production of them.

The terrain gets rougher as you approach, fracturing into chasms where mealy sludge falls in place of water and the wind mutters awful things, twisting the tattered flags of a thousand dead nations. Through the clouds a milky and occluded sun begins to plunge down, down.

Memories drift up into your consciousness like corpses freed from the bottom of a river. It is told the palace once had a king. He was not a wise king, or a just king. His people did not love him. He was a tyrant, a thug with monstrous appetites, and all he wanted was to be remembered. In his hubris he birthed a vision of a palace above all others, a final palace, one that could stand as a bulwark against any calamity. The petty humiliations of time would not stain its lucent walls. To assist in his execution, he retained an architect of singular powers, a man of edges and vertices. This architect perceived the folly of the kings plans in short order, for stone crumbles and iron rusts. He proposed instead a most unconventional substrate, one that could carry the palace for generations to come – the human mind.

The canyons resolve into a great valley of shimmering boulders, green-black like the tower but with a queer prismatic hue as if covered in a sheen of oil. A titanic pair of warped gates stand before you, each door thick as a legion of soldiers, pitted and wracked by some long-forgotten siege. Was an army assembled to capture this place, you wonder, to steal its secrets for their own masters? Or was it an attempt to eradicate it, to put a stop to the uncountable blasphemies fostered in it’s creation? Several sections at the foot of the gates have melted and reformed, leaving tunnels through the opalescent rock like cells in a gigantic hive, carpets of frozen slag rolling out in tongues.

Were you a soldier in such an army? No, you don’t think so. But there were others, at the start of your journey, a flux of faces and forms, a mercurial procession marching backwards into time. You do not know where they went, only that you once travelled with many like you, all damned in their own ways.

Stepping into the grounds of the palace feels almost peaceful. The air is cool and still, less choked with that maddening grey grit that still clings to your teeth and tongue. You came here seeking freedom, you remember that much. They say the crucible at the lowest point of the green tower can grant any wish, no matter how inimical or perverse. You wander through dried-out gardens and sunken courtyards, creations immeasurably ancient that stand apart from the known world in design and function. No logic is apparent in the arrangement of the ruins, repeating as they do with minor variations throughout the complex. Their faintest suggestion of a pattern tugs insistently at your mind. Clusters of masonry sprout like fungi. Oubliettes pockmark the ground, waiting patiently to be filled. Only the doorways remain standing whole, arches that could fit a phalanx marching abreast.

There are traces of Mayan, perhaps, or Sumerian, in the crumbling eyeless monoliths that loom above you, but the asymmetrical stars and angular patterns carved into their sides belong to know civilisation you know of. Shadows stretch from the etchings as the mountains rise to extinguish the sun. Nobody knows how old the last palace is. It appears in no recorded histories. Time has scoured it clean.

Closer now, you can see that the tower is in fact a pillar of vitrified glass, a frozen lightning bolt piercing the heart of the palace. It is if creation itself could not abide such a place, even in the world of dream, and sought to destroy it utterly. A gulf of shadow separates you from the tower, many leagues across. It tempts you, the dizzying unreality of vertigo. There is a magnetism to it, the supplicating crush of a whirlpool. At the ragged lip of the crater a narrow staircase has been carved into the crumbling rock, leading to a thin seam perceptible only by a change in the quality of the darkness.

You go down, down, seeking the green tower. The corridors of blank stone grow narrower and more tortuous. At times the path doubles back on itself and you sense somehow you are navigating spaces you occupied a moment before.

Another fragment of the story returns to you. The architect was no lackey of the king. He followed his own desires, in the pursuit of designs he could neither explain nor justify. He claimed the palace came to him in a vision. It was already planned, already named. Already built. For it had always been there, waiting on the outside, self contained and perfect. All it needed was to come through.

For many hours you trace the twisting paths, the walls puckering with alcoves and nooks that lead to rooms built with total disregard for the human form, such are their bizarre dimensions, their curious gutters and cutaways. The palace was built on the minds of men, shaped by those who visited it. They defiled it, the architect claimed, with their diseased minds. Criminals and perverts, psychotics and lotus-eaters. A parade of sour, unwashed bodies looking to gratify themselves. Yet none of them reached the base of the tower, to the ultimate prize.

Eventually, long after you should be dead from hunger or thirst, the corridor billows out into a gargantuan chamber, lit from nowhere with a chartreuse glow. Walls of chipped and smoky glass curve away into the murk, giving the barest impression of a dome or vault. Perhaps the entirety of the desert is underpinned by this complex, you think. Perhaps the desert is merely the eroded face of the palace, collapsing into new depths of chaos and formlessness.

This is throne room, but there is no throne, out there in the darkness. No, of course not. There was no king, you remember now, another scrap of a tale rushing to fill the hole in your skull. Only an architect, if that is the correct word.

You find another hole, after many days, a rent in the ground that smells of wet wool. You lower yourself through the gap, scraping against protrusions that paw greedily at your rags. A procession of shelves and chimneys follow, resembling caverns of melted crystal, spaces burnt or rotted out rather than hewn by mortal hands.

You must duck as the caverns become tunnels, undulating with boles and tumours of stone erupting from the walls, the ceilings. Some resemble varicoloured busts or skulls, rubbed away into a harlequin anonymity. It all seems designed to inspire loathing, but then again designed has the implication of studied effort, of deliberation. You hunch through a mirrored geode filled with dancing flickers. Just when the caverns look to be shrinking into little more than a crawlspace, they emerge onto the slope of a steep incline, a crater lined with glimmering rubble, an enormous quarry of fool’s gold sliding into oblivion. Displaced chunks topple and skip down into the caldera, into oblivion, betraying the outward appearance of the palace as an impossible mask.

This is the underside of the palace. From below, the spasmodic suggestion of a glow swirling in the iris of a hungry storm. Rays from distant suns that have brushed only the surface of lifeless worlds, light from the far reaches of this narrow universe where the stars were born embers. As that cold and hateful light shines up onto you, something scratches gently at your mind, begging to be let in.

The green tower is near. But where?

Below you hangs a huge sphere of rusted metal in the bowel of the caldera, suspended in place by titanic chains. It has been rendered alien by its surroundings, for it is clearly a device built by human hands. With delicate steps, you pad along the slope until you can straddle the chain bridge, each link the size of three men. As you shuffle along it a movement catches your eye. A procession in the deepest reaches of the pit that bathes in the dead glare, shapes terrible and familiar. Even from this great distance it is clear that they are monstrously deformed beings, their limbs drooping and angled beyond human limitations, melting in and out of the walls of the pit. What is less clear is whether they are alive or some variety of stony marionette, for they never falter in their repetitious bobbing and carousing around, limbs flailing as if jerked by hidden wires, back into the jagged rock and out again.

The entities do not stop in their march yet the you feel they can sense your presence. Peridot light swells from below, along with soft winds of unknown providence. The air begins to hum.

You approach the crucible. This is where entropy would hold no dominion. Others called it an observatory. A bathysphere. It is where the forces of creation could be harnessed to grant anything one desires.

You behold a desert of that same sand that led you to this place, but the sky is gone. Far ahead lies the faintest outline of a mountain range. The door clanks shut behind you. A tide of grit whips along the floor of the chamber, carried by a breeze of unknown providence. Upon the air you catch hissing snatches of words, muttered imprecations that are growing louder, growing cleared.

There comes a light. Distant, but growing. A cold and awful starlight projected up through what you thought were mountains, now revealed in the false dawn as towering spines of jagged glass, splitting and refracting into a nightmare kaleidoscope. The green tower. Far from being sent to destroy the palace, it was birthed from it, a single juddering thrust emerging to puncture reality. A proboscis, a hypodermic.

You scrabble at the hatch. Rust has permeated the metal so deeply that the handles collapse into fungoid threads. This is not real, you mumble, none of this is happening. Are you not supposed to be able to control these situations? This is a fantasy, a concoction. Is it not a simple matter of wishing, wishing so very hard…

You pound upon the door, harder and harder. The bones in your hands splinter and fuse again with every blow. You are aware, distantly, that you are screaming. You remember it all, now that it is too late. There was never a king, and there was never an architect. There was only a tower, waiting to be found, waiting to be descended. You remember the name of this place, coaxed from a fluid-bogged lung or a red slash of a throat. A thousand names, a thousand blackest curses in a thousand languages, a field of blooms grown from the same poisoned soil. You hear them all as the voices on the wind babble and grow frantic, shrieking.

You hurl yourself against the hatch one final time. The mountains of glass wails as they crack open, letting in a force of purest error, ripping you from the dream-

Your mouth works like a fish gasping air, trying to grasp the word twisting in your mind, an infinite chain of opals too slick to grasp running between your fingers, leaving only mutating residue behind.

Someone is with you, in this room. In this darkness. It is very cold, and there are many, many people in here with you.

You can speak the name. You repeat it. It hurts as it spills out of you.

You cannot move. You cannot move. Every moment those dark halls fill your head. My god! The weight of them, pushing down all other thoughts, crushing them, a crown of stone that no man could ever hope to bear. You screw shut your eyes and see those things thrashing in the pit, now above you. You recognise them, all of your compatriots, and they recognise you before they are compacted back into the stone, into the sediment of the countless forgotten bodies that form the foundations of the palace.

The others are coming for you, alerted by your thrashings, but it is far too late. Coiling, grinding in your skull is the endless name which resounds amongst laughing and gibbering, carried by a dead wind in the halls of the last palace. When they arrive to lay their hands upon you, you will be sure to tell them all that you have heard.