Friday Lore Post: The Tower

The tower has always existed. Or at least that’s what the gods claim. Sitting innocuously in the middle of nowhere, the tower is a metaphysical concept first and an architectural reality only incidentally. It is a gateway to the realm of corruption, from which spring demons and all manner of beings that cannot coexist in our world.

It was not always this way. The gods understand the gate as the entrance to the Gated Land, the other realm from which they originated. In their worldview, they were imprisoned in the Gated Land by entities with power beyond measure, whom they eventually defeated and then trapped in their own prison. Some debate did exist amongst the gods about the veracity of these claims; for surely they were not currently living in the world created by and for the demons who were anathema to creation. Furthermore, many of the gods noted that it was not possible to claim that the tower had always existed and simultaneously claim that it was created as a means of escaping the Gated land.

No solution to this was ever satisfactorily posited by any of the gods, though some did speculate that perhaps the realm on the other side of the gate was not the realm from which they’d come but rather a different plane of existence, the one from which the demonic creatures who threatened their world came. All that anyone knew for sure was that after the war between the gods and the demons, the demons were banished to a realm on the other side of the gate that was the tower and locked there with a matrix of energy that came to be called the Web.

Knowing what was on the other side of the tower and the importance of keeping it there, the gods appointed one of their best fighters, Odrick Dekath He’Matkar, to be its guardian. Odrick was killed and the tower destroyed in the year marked by humans as SC -410, and the Web shattered, destroying the lock as well. Miraculously and for reasons the gods do not fully understand, the gate remains shut, leaving them to assume that Odrick must have sealed it before his death.

Two hundred years later, the first attempt to rebuild the tower was made by Lyren Techen Le’Carden and his followers, which ultimately ended in massacre as fervent worshipers of Nathen Jerrel De’Kerken found and destroyed Lyren’s settlement, and Lyren killed them all in exchange, resulting in his own sealing at the once and future site of the tower. In the present day, Lyren has become unsealed and, with the aid of his new human congregation, is attempting to rebuild the tower again. He claims this is meant as a rallying cry, to unite humanity and gods under one banner again. Critics are skeptical of his utopian vision, or at least would be if they knew he was active again, and would fear that he is planning to open the gate in an attempt to harness the power on the other side.

The above is what is known about the tower by the various denizens of the world who know of its existence. What follows is not known to anyone who lives on the planet.

The tower and the gate that it represents are not eternal. The external architecture of the tower, and the Web that kept it locked, were crafted by the earliest gods during the war as a way of sealing the gate, but the gate itself was already present, opened by aliens trying to flee their own world and the monsters that were about to destroy it. The opening of the gate, however, left this world susceptible to attack from the same monsters, eventually instigating the war between the creatures who would later be called gods and demons.

The gate no longer leads to the world from which the aliens fled. It was corrupted by the monstrous creatures, and now opens to their own world, the same world that leaked into the aliens’ world, allowing it to be destroyed. This world does not exist in the universe as it is understood by most of its inhabitants, and instead is part of a dimensional plane of existence that cannot be comprehended by creatures not from it. Fortunately, the creatures from this dimension do not easily cross over into a different one, requiring gates like the one that is currently sealed shut to enter. Many such gates do exist in the conventional universe, but all known gates have either been sealed and are being carefully monitored, or have been destroyed, often along with at least a large portion of the planet on which they opened.

Gates are rarely dangerous unless opened, and opening a gate is rarely a mistake that is made twice. Sufficient power exists natively on this planet to prevent the opening of the gate and to combat the creatures on the other side if it is opened, and the intergalactic monitoring community puts the planet’s chances at being destroyed by interdimensional aliens at only 21%, far below the threshold for intervention. One last important note is that though those observing the planet are aware that it contains a gate, they do not know its exact location.

The tower has been implicated in some way with nearly every globally destructive conflict the planet has ever seen. Given its importance and what lurks behind it, it is safe to assume it will feature in future conflicts as well. Those affected by it can only hope that, in absence of all the information, cooler heads will eventually prevail.

From “Nova: A Witnessed History,” by Razzgkrar’thengg-ysshrrmdj’znvya’gnkiia, updated SC 3777.