Prelude

We followed the Curate in through the doors. My and Rowan's clothes were still soaking, but when we stepped through the doors, the Curate simply lifted a finger. All the water on us vaporized in an instant.

This, under most circumstances, would have been quite impressive. However, we were more stunned by the room we had just entered.

I say "room" rather loosely in this case, because what we were seeing was less a room and more the entire tower.

 Indeed, the sight that greeted us was an awe-inspiring one.

Within the tower was neither an assortment of rooms, nor any other variation of such that would imply an, at least partial, lack of hollowness to the structure. While impossible to tell from the outside, the entire tower was, to put it simply, a hollow cone, with walls hardly a few feet thick.

And what filled it, was books.

Three gargantuan bookshelves of increasing size, each one enclosing the next, formed three rings if viewed from above, similar to a target. Another bookshelf remarkably akin to a central pillar represented the bullseye, sitting in the middle of the room. Each shelf stretched into the heavens, so high that their apex couldn't be seen. The bookshelves, just like the floor, were constructed of the same water-like crystal as the tower itself.  With roughly 40 feet of area between each bookshelf, and four gaps roughly 30 feet wide between the three larger bookshelves at the cardinal directions, clearly meant to offer paths through the layers of bookshelves, the room was quite spacious.

Nearly as interesting was that the entire outer wall of the room was, although wholly perceptible, highly transparent, like glass, albeit with a faint aqua-blue tinge, and a nearly imperceptible shimmering of the same nature as the outside of the tower.

In addition, lining the floor by the outer wall were a great number of circular disks of a dark material, roughly two feet in diameter, and imperceptibly thick.

Needless to say, I was enchanted by this room like I had never been in my life. I could spend an eternity here. So many books. So many stories. I started wandering over towards the first ring of shelves, but the Curate politely stopped me.

"While I welcome you to the collection, please postpone any browsing for now. There is business to atttend to."

The Curate led us to the closest four dark disks, and following his lead, we stepped onto them. 

The disks began slowly ascending through the air. I was initially startled, but I found that the disks were quite stable, never tilting when I shifted my weight. My feet were stuck to the disk as well.

I also quickly found that I could control the direction and speed of my disk with simply a thought.

Me and Rowan immediately began racing around the atrium, trying to see who could do a lap the quickest, but once our altitude had risen high enough, we both stopped. It took only 5 minutes for us to be hundreds of feet up, maybe thousands. The view was dizzying, to say the least. If you fell, you'd make a big splat, that's for sure. Although I doubted these things were designed to allow that.

These things must be how you reach the books on the shelves, I realized. There was no other way for someone to obtain books this high up.

Since the outer wall was contracting as we got higher, although very slowly, we moved through the closest gap in the outer ring into the space between the largest and second largest rings of shelves. Eventually, we saw the top of the outer layer of shelves. There was only about 5 feet between the shelf and wall at that point. 

This process continued; we ascended for a few minutes, then moved into the next space between layers once it got cramped, until we were in the innermost layer. I hovered over towards the central pillar of shelves, and skimmed the book titles as best I could while rising at our speed. I don't know what I was expecting to see, since there shouldn't be any books here I would recognize. However, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of familiarity when I saw some of the names. I couldn't tell you why; maybe some of the books were truly the same as ones I had in my world, or perhaps it was just coincidence. Theres a limit to how many different titles there can be for books, after all, so it would be reasonable to assume many of these shared titles, or at least had similar ones, to books in my old world.

Of course, many books had no titles, or titles in languages I couldn't even recognize, let alone understand.

Something else worthy of notice was the view from this height. Since the outer walls were transparent, and we were incredibly high up at this point, we could see for miles in every direction, an experience both terrifying and extraordinarily magnificent. We were so high we were actually approaching the level of the clouds. The view admittedly lacked detail, since the walls still had the same imperceptible shimmering to them, which although nearly unnoticeable most of the time, still slightly blurred any details for most distances you looked out at.

Eventually I noticed that the walls had stopped sloping inward. It took a little while, since the tower's height was so great that any slope was imperceptible unless viewed over a long period of time, but I recognized that they hadn't gotten any closer to us for the past couple minutes. The diameter had stopped at about 30 feet.

We had all been awkwardly silent over the course of the descent, but eventually I spoke up.

"It looks like the top of the tower is approaching."

As we passed through the layer of clouds surrounding the tower, I could see looking upward that the ceiling of the tower was visible. It looked like Serric was waiting for us.

We finally reached the apex of the tower. Our disks stopped with the tops of our heads being a few feet shy of the roof.

"Please take us to the next layer up, Curate Raziel." Serric asked.

"You truly wish to go through with this?"

"I do."

The Curate nodded, his golden eyes gleaming with light.

"Very well."

Our disks began rising again. While I logically knew that we weren't going to hit the roof, I still had to lift my hand up to make myself feel emotionally secure that, yes, we were going to pass through the ceiling, despite how solid it looked.

And pass through we did.

What greeted my eyes next was the true apex of the tower.

We were out in the open now.

It was what could only be described as a balcony, or an overlook. The diameter had extended to roughly 50 feet. I took a tentative step off the disk, and once I felt that the floor was firm, dismounted it entirely.

The edge of the balcony overlooked nothing but clouds in all directions. It was a mostly sunny day, but a large cumulonimbus happened to be sitting directly under us right now, blocking our vision entirely.

The only thing I could see was the sun, shining brightly down on us.

The only notable thing up here was a large tome on a pedestal in the center of the balcony. It bore no elaborate engravings or patterns, and the title was nowhere to be found.

"Asher. Rowan. Gloria. I am going to forge a prophecy." Serric said.