Work Text:
This is the tower, borne of evil thought. It climbs.
It is ridiculous, of course, to say a tower was made in malice. Whatever the intentions of the architect, the architect is not the builders. Sorcery alone cannot raise stone. If you look at the slopes of the mountain you can see a whole side cut away, ancient volcanic lava flow cut into squares, dragged 30 miles away, and stacked high. It is the work of over the century. Several centuries, for it was built twice, dragged down to its foundations and then built up again.
There is blood in the mortar, and tears. There is laughter too. Caught up amid spells of strengthening and lifting are songs of men and orcs, slaves of different kinds united in the hum of work.
Some of them left handprints in the cement or chipped their marks in the dark volcanic stone. The walls are like adamant. Some call them unbreakable. But adamant can mark adamant, iron can scratch iron. Fragments of the stone used in building can mar the smooth black surface. Time too has made its mark. After ages of use there are footpaths worn in every stair. Each hallway shows the trajectory of least resistance and you can make a study by comparison of which places are most frequented (at least by those whose feet drag heavy on the ground).
This is the tower. Like all towers it starts at a base. The are wide courtyards fit to host armies of ten thousand, granaries and armories, menageries of beasts, wolves in their pens, fetid tanneries for curing hides, pits for throwing people down and forgetting them. There are ten thousand crenellations high upon the battlements, many miles of zigzagging walls patrolled by armed guards.
It’s strange, no one mentions the singing when they speak of orcs. There is always singing. Other peoples might not like it much, picky as they are, but they don’t get to decide what a song is. And songs, sung for thousands of years, over and over, the same tune mutating as it moves through different troops, they’ll sink into a place. The very stones will change.
Even on quiet days in the courtyards where the garrisons are housed you can hear the stone thrumming. They’re old rhythms, older than the sun.
There are bakeries with great clay furnaces beneath the sky. There are bakers—where there are bakeries there must be bakers! They move with a military precision but on the smoked darkened clay of their ovens they’ve daubed in lighter mud, designs. Triangles, waves, a thousand eyes. On one oven, fish. They are a very far way from the sea.
Go up a little in the tower. Here there are prison cells and torture chambers. People rot and die here but for a while they live and while they live they scratch messages into the walls or paint the floor with their blood. They leave records on the stone.
In the tower there are also guests and vassals, those who make a home here. Some even come by their own will. It is not a tower made for homeliness so they cover up its failings. There are wall hangings and sweet candles to cover up the stench of rot and smoke. There is incense. There are brightly made objects of ceramic, glass, silver, gold.
They too leave their graffiti. Knowing the scale on while their master works they scribble “I was here” in the margins and hope the next person to end up in their bedroom whispers their name.
It’s never quite enough. The tower is larger than any patch that tries to cover it. It overwhelms any effort to overwrite it. It is always impossible to ignore what you see when you look out the window.
Up more, here is where the ruling happens. Here the tower aims for majesty and finds instead menace. There is marble (too pale and clean and seamless) and there is gold (oil slick, sickly) and there is even mithril, the queen of metals, shining weakly from every post.
Below there is a throne of granite and iron, hewn out of the mountain itself in one clean chunk. A brute’s throne, for ordering about subjects who respect strength over beauty. But he has several parties to appease, and he’s always found mortals easier led by greed. Here he rules from a sparkling seat and masks his face.
The ceilings are cavernous. The floors are slippery. It feels like a soap bubble, a clean place turned inside out.
Higher still, find the summit and the window. Here you can see the smog clouds swarming, see the volcano bubbling next door. The plain lays below you like a great grey blanket, flat and fuzzy. Uninteresting, if your sight isn’t keen enough to pick out details.
If your sight is keen, and you know the world before it curled in on itself like a pill bug dying, you can see further still. Over the mountains, past the horizon, on and on. If small impediments like trees and stone don’t bother you, then little is beyond your sight.
It’s a very tall tower.
This is the tower. It’s barely art (though its maker would argue otherwise). Art is made with a purpose other than the purely practical.
The architect’s diagrams are splendid, a masterwork. The lines are clean, the effect imposing. Millions have cowered in its shadow over centuries and yet it lacks a certain…
Intentionality.
It’s built of a thousand smaller masterpieces. In every scribbled scrap of poetry a Gondoran soldier wrote on his prison wall, in every delicate obsidian inscription advising future courtiers to veil their eyes from ash, in every crude orc pictogram of two war-chariots having sex, this tower is made of little works.
The ambassador’s necklace, glass beads draped just so. The iron shield for a soldier who will die soon, embossed with little wolves chasing each other in an endless game. The baker’s bread, sliced on top like a flower.
This is the tower. It’s falling. Down come the shining halls, the mithril and gold. Down come the prison cells and a thousand years of last words written by desperate men. They fall on the bakeries and the bakers, armories and armorers.
Handprints, footprints, daubed mud, tapestries from home, in the stone the little graffiti and breath of an age. It collapses.
Heat washes over it.
Long after the dust settles, people come to pick through the wreckage.
It’s good stone, some of the blocks held up well despite the collapse and even the chips and chunks can be used for piecework.
Out of obsidian they can have knives. Out of the metal scavenged, swords and pots.
They make walls for sheep and houses for their children. They build roads.
In the very middle of the heap some people begin to leave their marks. They pile small stones into grave markers (for those who didn’t make it out alive) or they write their name on the stones that were once the tower. They draw pictures, daubed in mud. They dig down in the tuff of ash to find the stones that seem to hum in half remembered melody and they hum along.
A tower outlives what mind conceived it.