The Antechamber was a curious construction, impossible to reach in any way other than stepping through a portal after defeating the guardian of a floor. There was no attunement to it and no way to return to it, and a climber only had one hundred opportunities to visit it, once for each portal guardian they defeated inside the tower.

  Then again, that’s an assumption we always made. No one knew what the Floor 100 portal guardian was standing in front of. For that matter, we just assumed a tower is only a hundred floors because that’s what our elders told us.

  Sorin had read plenty of speculation about the Antechamber throughout the years. Copious amounts of testing had helped climbers determine the shape of its rules, but they could only guess at the specifics of the reasoning behind them. The tower would do what the tower wanted, as arbitrary and uncaring as always.

  He’d wondered if he’d stepped into the Antechamber at the end of the final floor of his home tower, and if so, what he’d seen there. The mosaic that made up the floor of his soulspace might show him one day, when it grew big enough to reveal more details than just that strange door and its oddly familiar symbol.

  So far, the rules of the tower had all been the same. The people were different; their society and their laws had changed, but the tower itself remained constant. Oh, the floors looked different. The monsters had been shuffled around. But they were otherwise the same creatures he’d grown familiar with the first time he’d climbed the tower.

  Some of the aesthetics were different. The tower itself being red instead of blue and the associated portals taking on the same color was a prime example of something that seemed to have changed simply for the sake of change. As far as Sorin could tell, everything was still functionally the same.

  That was why he was slightly surprised to appear in the Antechamber alone. The polished red tiles, fluted columns of red marble, and pinpricks of red starlight in a vault of black overhead were along the lines of expected changes. Transitioning from Floor 1 by himself was decidedly not.

  Under normal circumstances, he would have appeared with his group. Even if someone came through a few minutes later, as long as they were part of the same battle against the portal guardian, they’d arrive in the Antechamber together. The only exception would be someone like Vestus, who’d already achieved rank 2 and couldn’t revisit the Floor 1 Antechamber.

  If nothing had changed, there would also be a hard cap on the number of people who could participate, up to a maximum of six, so Sorin supposed Vestus must have remained in the background, not doing so much as healing a papercut, else their kill against the portal guardian would have failed to grant them their rank up and attunement.

  The tower, it seemed, was not inclined to allow climbers to game its challenges by sheer weight of numbers. If climbers didn’t overcome the enemies set before them according to the tower’s rules, receiving nothing for their efforts was the best result they could hope for. The number of climbers who’d attempted such methods and then simply disappeared—never to be seen again—on their very next climb was disturbingly high.

  Sorin took a few steps into the Antechamber and stopped to look around. The portal closed behind him, leaving him trapped and alone. That part’s normal, he reminded himself. The cache appears, then a new portal opens to Floor 2.

  Only the cache didn’t appear, and a new portal didn’t open. Instead, a platform rose through the marble like it was water, even causing ripples to appear in the stone. The blue tower he’d spent his life in sat on one side of it, as real and distinctly detailed as his memories of it. It glowed softly, an aura of anima pulsing around it.

  On the left side was the ghostly outline of the new red tower he’d just arrived at. Only a small sliver at the very bottom was lit up. Just one floor’s worth, maybe? That was an interesting representation of his progress, he supposed, but not terribly necessary. It was what was on the rest of the platform that concerned him.

  There were five more silhouettes sharing space with the two towers, each one shaded a different color. The details were lost on those towers, being nothing but a solid smear of orange or green or yellow, but the implication was clear.

  “Seven towers, just like in the mosaic,” Sorin breathed out. “Climbing all of them would take multiple lifetimes. That can’t be what it wants… What they want?”

  Despite what some cultish subsections of the population would say, it was widely accepted that the tower was alive and sentient in some way. It was too malicious for everything to be mere coincidence. The tower knew what its climbers were trying to do, and it reacted to them, punishing them for violating its unwritten rules.

  The idea that there were seven towers immediately led to the question: were they all separate, or did a single entity control everything? Was there some sort of tower overmind? Were they just passing climbers around as they felt like it? Was that where climbers who disappeared went—shunted off to a different tower to start over again?

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  Did I end up here because I got to the top of my home tower, or was I just unlucky enough to get pushed over right at the end? Is that why I can’t remember what happened on the final floor, because I never finished it?

  Sorin circled the platform a few times, examining each tower in turn. There were no real clues there, not with the blue or red towers, at least. They seemed to just be representative of his progress. He supposed he could assume he’d finished the blue tower since it was glowing all the way to the very top, but that was just a supposition built on even more suppositions.

  What really interested him was the dark indigo silhouette on the left side. Unlike the others, it wasn’t a solid color, and it seemed to Sorin that it almost looked damaged in some way. The edges were jagged instead of smooth, and there were tiny holes devoid of color. That could just be whatever decorations that tower had, possibly. Each one had a unique profile that way.

  But when he looked closer, he saw small swirls of void-black hidden inside the color. It was subtle, just micro-thin lines of thread that seemed to vanish whenever Sorin tried to look at one directly, but there was definitely something different about that tower.

  A line of black slipped out of one of the holes and curled around the tower, just for a split-second, before vanishing back into the silhouette. Sorin jerked back away from the void tendril, not in any way eager to deal with another brush up against that. He’d only lost a bit of anima when the voidling had grabbed onto his leg, but it could have easily been worse.

  “The hell does that mean?” he muttered to himself.

  It was easy to spin out theories, but without more information, that was all they were. That tower could be the source of the voidlings, a hollow shell reaching out to infect the other six. Or maybe all of them had void inside of them, and that one was damaged in some way to let it seep out. Or maybe it meant nothing, all of it merely being an illusion designed to confuse him.

  Abruptly, the towers vanished, leaving nothing but a blank pedestal of red marble with veins of black running through it sitting at waist height. Sorin glanced around, looking for other changes, but there was nothing—no cache, no exit.

  Seven small circles of colored light replaced the towers, then another circle appeared in the middle, only about eight inches wide. Lines shot off from each pool of color, cutting at sharp angles to line up in parallel as they bisected the center circle.

  Rue was right, Sorin thought with a silent laugh. It was a rainbow after all.

  He pulled out the slate he’d taken from the ruin and held it up. It was a perfect match for the design on the pedestal, right down to the size and positioning of each line. The smaller, hand-held version Sorin possessed even started glowing in response to the pedestal’s image.

  The slate pulled itself from Sorin’s hands, spinning through the air before coming to rest in alignment with the pedestal. It lowered itself into place, and the glow intensified to a blinding white light that washed out every other color. When Sorin could see again, the Antechamber was gone. Instead, he stood inside his soulspace.

  The tile mosaic hadn’t expanded. His soulspace was no bigger now than it had been before he’d helped kill the Floor 1 portal guardian. If nothing else, that was proof that whatever he’d done in the ruin had made him a true rank 2 in all the ways that mattered. There was no room for a new soulprint, though his current ones still had space to grow. He wouldn’t be able to push them up to the next rank with his current capacity, and probably not even at rank 3. Soulprints got exponentially bigger as they ranked up.

  There was one change, though. The image on the door in his mosaic glittered in full color, no longer looking washed out or dim. Anima radiated off it, but not his anima. That should have been impossible. By its very definition, all anima inside his soulspace was his. Otherwise it couldn’t be there.

  This new anima formed its own soulprint, one that didn’t take a space on his wall. One that he got the sense he couldn’t feed to make it grow, or at least he couldn’t feed it the ordinary anima he harvested from tower monsters. It would take something else, but Sorin had no clue what. All he knew was the name of this strange soulprint stamped into the floor of his soulspace.

  Liminal Gateway.

  That was it. The tower gave him no hints, no clues, and no explanations. As always, Sorin was left to unravel the mystery himself—or to fail if it came down to that. He pulled himself back out of his soulspace and looked around the Antechamber, mostly to confirm to himself that it was still there and that nothing had changed. That included the portal to Floor 2 failing to materialize.

  It’s called a gateway. I guess it’s time to find out where it leads.

  Sorin fell back into his soulspace and moved over to stand on the circle. It had been years since the last time he’d needed to be actually inside his soulspace to learn how to use a new soulprint, but it was the best way he knew, and he had no idea how much time he might need to fully escape the unexpected prison he’d found himself in.

  Liminal Gateway, he quickly discovered, was unique in a lot of ways beyond its placement in the floor of his soulspace. It didn’t pull from his anima reservoir, for one thing. Instead, it seemed to be more of a beacon, of sorts, drawing in anima from the Antechamber itself. That anima came to him in a wrist-thick strand of silver-gray, sparkling with glitter dust and undulating gently like some sort of underwater plant being tugged at by the ocean’s currents.

  Sorin barely had time to take in the details before the anima rope snapped taut. He found himself pulled off his feet, his body sailing through an endless black abyss that roiled over itself like a tower-sized voidling. For all he knew, maybe it was.

  Then he landed on a silver-gray path, a narrow, winding road that matched the rope still connected to his soulspace. It shed just enough light to hold the darkness at bay, and he got the sense that if he dared take a single step off to the side, he’d never find his way back.

  Alright. This is new. Let’s see where you take me.