All her life, Rue had been told stories about the fabled Antechamber between floors. All the best gear came from there. Every tale about some climber with a sword that could sever mountains or an armor that could repel dragon fire started with a visit to the Antechamber. Well, no, that wasn’t true. Sometimes it was a ruin cache or some legendary blacksmith who was also somehow a powerful climber.

  But regardless, if there was one thing people agreed on, it was that the good loot came from the Antechamber. Considering this was just the version between Floors 1 and 2, Rue didn’t get her hopes up. She was expecting something good, but not anything life changing.

  The Antechamber’s appearance was well-documented. Crimson marble tiles and rich, dark red pillars greeted her upon stepping through the portal. A raised dais in the middle of the room immediately caught her attention, not so much because it stood out from the rest of the Antechamber in some way, but because of what sat on it.

  Three small marble pedestals, maybe four feet in height and only six inches wide, stood proudly in a row. On top of them rested wooden chests, polished to a deep, ruddy burgundy glow. Gold accents gleamed in the corners of the chests, further highlighting exactly how fancy—and thus expensive—the chests were.

  There’s going to be some good shit in there, she thought greedily.

  “Where’s Sorin?” Nemari asked from behind her. “I thought he came in with us.”

  It was only then that Rue realized there was a problem. Each person was supposed to get their own box. She instinctively knew that hers was the one on the right, though she couldn’t tell which one belonged to her brother or Nemari. But Sorin had walked through the portal. Rue had been right behind him. He should have been in the Antechamber with them.

  Od frowned thoughtfully. “He should be here, but I suppose it’s hardly the first unusual thing about him.”

  “Maybe it had something to do with that ink monster he was fighting,” Rue said.

  “A voidling shouldn’t affect his entry into the Antechamber,” Od argued, but he didn’t sound that sure to Rue.

  “There are only three chests, so the Antechamber obviously doesn’t think he’s supposed to be here,” Nemari said. “We’re only going to get a few minutes in here before the tower kicks us out, so we’d best loot those chests now. We’ll worry about Sorin after.”

  That was the kind of logic Rue could get behind. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to Sorin, of course. Ignoring any moral or emotional factors, that man was her golden ticket to the good life. All she had to do was keep up with him. Whatever had happened to him, she had no doubt he’d survive it. Hopefully, finding him after they landed on Floor 2 would be easy.

  But for right now, she gleefully approached the treasure chest that called to her. Everyone knew that, unlike normal caches of tower-forged gear, the Antechamber always gave a climber something they personally could use, usually in the form of a soulprint. And Rue could not wait to find out what it would be.

  The chest slipped open almost on its own the instant she touched it, the lid falling back to reveal the contents. Rue reached in to grasp what felt like a soft piece of fabric, and eagerness turned to confusion. Is this a shirt or something? It better be magical, at least!

  But then she pulled it out to see nothing more than a square handkerchief. It was nice, soft and clean with patterned edges and a deep, rich maroon color. There was anima in it, so it was special in some way, but she’d forgotten that the whole group relied on Sorin to tell them what things were. Normal teams had to haul loot back to specialists who could figure out what properties the tower-forged equipment might have or what abilities were locked inside soulprints.

  She exchanged equally bemused glances with the rest of her team, who were holding up a thin, tapered wand in Nemari’s case and a lump of some sort of metal in Od’s. “Huh. Yeah, kind of forgot that we wouldn’t know what they were without Sorin,” Rue said.

  “No matter,” Nemari told her. She unslung her pack and placed the stick inside. “We’ll find out sooner or later. Take a minute to prepare, then…”

  She cast a pointed glance at the back end of the Antechamber, where a familiar red portal was waiting for them. Floor 2 lay just beyond it, but there was no telling where they’d end up once they got there. Hopefully not on top of a whole burrow full of sleeping monsters again.

  * * *

  The road wasn’t very long. Or rather, it was, but unfortunately, Sorin’s portion of it seemed to have a bridge out. It only went a hundred feet, if that, before falling away into nothing. He stood near the edge, just outside of where it tapered down to nothing, and stared into the shifting blackness that separated him by a bare handful of feet from another section of road. If he’d been anywhere else, he’d have thought nothing of casually hopping over it. A child could have jumped that gap.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Leaving the path, however, struck him as a monumentally stupid idea. He had no plans on stepping into the darkness, not unless he had absolutely no other options. And, for the moment at least, there was a bit of exploring left to do. There were two directions left to explore.

  The first was simply to turn around and walk the other way. He’d arrived on the silver path facing what he’d arbitrarily decided was north, but there was still some path at his back. A casual glance had revealed nothing, but that didn’t mean it was so.

  The second option was a thin little side path, more of a nub or bump. It barely stretched five feet off the main path, and was only half as wide. Sorin had ignored it when he’d first walked by simply because there’d been nothing there to see. Now that he’d reached the end and discovered nothing of interest, he didn’t have a lot of choice left.

  It was the work of moments to backtrack to the stubby little offshoot. From where he stood on the main path, it looked the same as the first time he’d casually glanced over while walking by. Once he took a single step onto the trail, though, things changed.

  The shape of a place began to form around him, creating a sort of hollow, translucent shell between himself and the void beyond the trail. A second step called a flush of color and detail to the scene, enough for him to recognize it.

  The cave I killed those three climbers at, he realized. The first physical place I saw the sign of the seven towers. Is it… Hmm. This isn’t a portal, at least not in any way I recognize. But what happens if I take another step forward?

  There was only room for one before he reached the end. Almost hesitantly, he placed one foot in front of the other. Immediately the cave seemed to become real around him, complete with the smell and sounds. Something pulled at Sorin, threatening to rip him off his feet and send him tumbling forward. Curiosity alone almost drove him to let it, but for all he knew, it was an illusion and it would send him out into the inky darkness beyond the path.

  Sorin scrambled backward, and with each step, the scene faded. Once he was fully back on the main path, it was like it had never existed at all. The only thing left behind was that same small spit of silver-gray glittering trail.

  “Okay. Weird.”

  As soon as he said the words out loud, he regretted it. They didn’t echo, but something seemed to catch them, to transform them from the familiar sound of his own voice to a hissing, sinister thing. They flowed out into the ever-shifting darkness, where things he couldn’t quite manage to separate from each other roiled in constant motion.

  And then, abruptly, they were cut off. It was like watching a shark glide out of murky depths, unheard and unseen until the last possible moment, only to take off an arm in one smooth motion before it disappeared again. Only, it wasn’t a shark. It was the darkness itself eating the noise he’d made.

  Holy hells, he thought, his eyes wide. Note to self: don’t say anything else.

  Sorin had faced plenty of voidlings before, including some the size of giants. He’d felt the sting of them taking bites out of his very soul multiple times and learned how to adapt to the scars they’d left behind. He was as experienced as it was possible to be with voidlings.

  Whatever the fuck that was, he was not prepared to deal with it. He was becoming increasingly sure that all the darkness was voidlings crawling over each other, writhing around like a pit of maggots, except these voidlings were incomprehensibly large. He couldn’t tell where they began or where they ended. He couldn’t begin to guess at their numbers. And he didn’t have the slightest clue why the pathetic little strip of silver-gray glittering light held them back from devouring him.

  Don’t worry about that now. Worry about finding a way out. That cave is the backup plan, assuming I can actually walk through that image and end up there. Wait, is that how voidlings get into the tower? Do they fall onto this trail and slip inside?

  There were some holes to that theory, but he didn’t have anything better, so he put it out of his mind. Backtracking to the far end of the trail, behind where he’d started, revealed it narrowing down into a nub much like the one he’d found halfway down its length. The same sort of illusionary shell started to coalesce when it stepped onto it, except this time it didn’t show the cave.

  It took him a moment to recognize the alleyway he’d woken up in on his first day in the new tower. It was the trash that gave it away, though, still piled up in the same spots, only with a fresh layer of debris on top of it. Things hadn’t changed much on Floor 0.

  I don’t remember seeing the seven tower sign there, but I suppose I didn’t dig around through the garbage. It could have been on the ground or on a wall nearby, and I never would have noticed it.

  If that meant he could get back to Floor 0, that was far better than a random cave on Floor 1. Odric had their supplies, and trying to march through Floor 1 by himself while foraging for food and water for the better part of a week didn’t appeal to him. A quick trip from the alleyways to the portal hub would be far quicker and safer.

  But what he really needed was to find his way to Floor 2. And if this side led to Floor 0, and the side path led to the cave where he’d seen the sign carved into the wall, then it stood to reason that the far end might dump him out wherever the normal portal should have taken him to if his Antechamber hadn’t been so weird.

  Sorin approached the north-side nub and took his first step onto it. He’d expected to see another illusion, this time of a place he didn’t recognize on Floor 2. Failing that, he figured it would at least offer him the choice of returning to the wolf shrine on Floor 1. Unfortunately, neither happened. Instead, the path filled with a dense fog, one so thick that it hid the darkness beyond the path.

  Don’t misstep, he told himself. He could barely even see the silver-gray of the path beneath his feet after only a single step.

  The fog thickened with the second step, so much so that he was effectively blind. His own hand was invisible in front of his face. I guess the tower doesn’t want me to see where I’m about to land.

  With the third step, the world fell away. Sorin had one brief moment of sheer terror as everything went black and he thought he’d walked off the path, then the world snapped back into place. Furious screaming filled the air, and before he could turn to see the source, something hit him from behind.