The stone tower where Lekif lived was hardly the sort of place that invited the word "adventure." If anything, its interior was a wretched hybrid—as if an ancient boiler room, a grimy workshop, and a pool of stagnant mud had been violently lashed together.

The air in the room was choked with the pungent stench of sulfur and the oppressive, metallic damp of wet iron, while from the depths below, a stifling heat rose in relentless waves. Soot-blackened baskets and rusted talons hung in chaotic disarray upon the walls, and the floor was littered with oil-stained woolens, discarded in a graceless, tangled mess.

Lekif extricated himself from his hammock—a fabric long since steeped in the pervasive stench of sulfur and damp iron—wriggling forth with the sullen, fumbling gestures of an irate caterpillar still clinging to the dregs of yesterday’s dream. It was precisely then that the digestive depths of the colossal spire, "Atouche," began to heave, exhaling a wretchedly sour sigh as the oppressive morning heat struck its metallic belly.

Atouche. A spire known in the archaic tongue as the “Great Scorching Kiln,” the tower was the very incarnation of a gargantuan exhaust flue thrust deep into the mire of the mud-sea. Like a cantankerous old man, it emitted a perpetual, guttural rumble from the depths of its bowels, day and night.

“Another damned morning,” Lekif muttered, rubbing the sleep from his bleary eyes as he spat his habitual curse out the window. Beyond the glass lay the familiar mudflats, stretching into a desolate infinity. To borrow the profane vocabulary he had gleaned from passing travelers, it was quite literally “a god-forsaken ocean of boundless shit.”

Yet, as the lingering shroud of sleep began to lift, a sudden pulse of exhilaration surged within Lekif’s breast at a strange discordance in the world beyond. There, amidst the mist-shrouded reaches of the far distance, lay the sprawling silhouette of a colossal carcass, slumped motionless upon the mud.

“Leviathan... stranded, it is!”

Recalling the unnerving haste with which the tide had ebbed the night before, Lekif cried out. Every lingering trace of sullen drowsiness vanished in an instant. His heart hammered with the violent rhythm of a searing boiler, his chest swelling with an anticipation so fierce it threatened to burst.

I must go see it. This very moment! If I can get close, if I can see it with my own eyes... just imagine the scale, the sheer—!

“Lakin! Shift yer hide down here! Pressure’s bleedin’ out—d’ye mean to let Atouche freeze to death!?”

A thunderous roar erupted from the floor below, the voice of the master, Huff Brand, reverberating through the iron floorboards like a tectonic shift.Lekif descended the stairs, his mind whirring with the velocity of a spinning gear. If that was the way of it, he’d have to dispatch his chores with clinical haste. “Fast-fettle, top-mettle, chuff-puff-go!”

Lekif seized his coarse woollen jacket and slung it roughly about his shoulders. By all rights, it was to be a day of leaden silence, marked only by the arrival of a solitary pipe-fitter. The season of pilgrimage had long since passed; there was no reason to expect any further intrusion upon their solitude. > Get the sweepin’ done, lend a hand with the patches—then, by sundown, I’m off to see that great beast for myself!

He made his descent with a buoyant haste, a newfound spring in his step. Now that his mind was set, he had to dispatch his duties without the loss of a single heartbeat. Upon reaching the lower deck, he found Master Huff Brand looming there, waiting with the immovable mass of a gargantuan bear. He was the absolute lord of this Spire of Atouche—a man who stoked the roaring kilns and hammered the recalcitrant conduits back into submission through sheer, raw-boned physical might.

“I’m gonna get the guest rooms cleared away first!” Lekif called out. “Eh? What’s come over ye today?” the master grunted, his brow furrowing. “Ye not hungered, lad?” “Just makes more sense to get it done before headin’ down,” Lekif replied quickly, avoiding the giant’s gaze. “Finished sooner that way.”

Though the master cast a quizzical glance in his wake, Lekif paid it no mind, pressing on toward the guest chambers. As the door swung wide, a heavy, nauseating tide of stale liquor and suffocating heat surged into the cold hallway. The floor beneath was a carpet of ruin, littered with the grain and pulverized peat scattered by the caravaners who had drifted in at the dregs of the previous night.

Drained tankards lay strewn across the tables in chaotic clusters, the silent wreckage of a riotous feast. Yet the crowning blow was the layer of peat dust that blanketed the entire floor like a fall of obsidian snow. Lekif snatched up a broom and began to sweep the soot into piles with painstaking care; for within the iron ribs of Atouche, anything that promised to surrender to the flame was a commodity of immense value.

It was only as the bulk of the wreckage began to recede that his eyes finally fell upon a figure huddled in the room’s dimmest corner—a man slumbering with the absolute, cadaverous stillness of the dead.

“Oi, stranger. Wake yer-self, now. I’ve a floor to sweep here.” Lekif reached out, giving the man’s shoulder a tentative, hesitant prod.

The man recoiled upward with the kinetic violence of a coiled spring, snapping into wakefulness in a single, fluid motion. Catching a glimpse of the stranger’s features at such jarring proximity, Lekif felt his eyes widen in involuntary shock. This was not the countenance of a local itinerant merchant—those somber faces perpetually etched with the damp misery of the silt-lands. Instead, his visage glowed with a warmth so misplaced it bordered on the surreal; he possessed a brilliance more radiant than any soul Lekif had ever encountered in his short, soot-stained life.

The stranger’s hair was a burnished gold, reminiscent of sun-drenched hay that had drunk deep of the daylight’s brilliance. It evoked a realm far beyond the reach of Lekif’s narrow experience—a place where the sands remained parched and the heavens vaulted infinitely high. The thought seized Lekif with the suddenness of an epiphany: this man had surely hailed from such a distant, sunlit world.

“Well now, this is a rare surprise. To find a child in such a place as this.” The man fixed Lekif with a steady gaze, his lips curling into a knowing, radiant grin. “Ye better look sharp,” Lekif grunted, his voice a blunt, gravelly edge against the stranger’s lightness. “Hurry it up an’ ye might still catch yer caravan. They've only just gone.” Paying no heed to the boy’s brusque caution, the man remained deeply ensconced within the frame of his chair, offering a shrug of such sinuous, effortless grace it felt utterly misplaced amidst the surrounding grit.

“Companions, you say? Ah, if you mean that rabble of tavern-flies, they parted ways with me long before the first light. They made a wretched stir rummaging through their kits before scurrying off into the gloom. But tell me... do you truly dwell here, within this spire?” The man’s voice possessed a crystalline resonance, light and melodic, as though the air itself had been struck like the string of a finely tuned instrument.

“Aye, ’course it is. This be me workplace, through and through,” Lekif shot back, his voice thick with a defensive pride. “How singularly cruel,” the stranger murmured, a cold, mocking sneer ghosting across his lips. “So this is the way of it in the Northeast Marches—in Nel-Guzast. They go so far as to entomb even their children in such a place.”

“The caravan lot, they’re gone ’fore the light breaks—scattered as far as they can get,” Lekif said, his voice tightening with an urgent, rough-edged sincerity. “There’s a swell comin’. The next Great Wave. Best ye haul yer-self out of here, an’ quick, or ye’ll be drownin’ in the muck ’fore ye ever sight the next waystation.”

“My deepest thanks for the counsel, lad, but I think I shall impose upon this tower’s hospitality for another night,” the stranger replied, his voice a silken ribbon drifting through the sulfurous air. “Should the hall remain empty of other guests, perhaps I’ll regale you with a tale or two. I have stories for every appetite—fables to delight a child, or darker truths meant only for the ears of men. Fearsome beasts, restless spirits, legendary heroes... I have them all in my keep.”

The stranger was a vivid intrusion upon this grey, sodden world. Struck dumb by the weight of the man’s offer, Lekif abandoned him to the shadows and retreated toward the dining hall, seeking the familiar embrace of steam and salt.

Upon the table sat the customary fare: moss bread, salted fish, and a thin turnip broth. Hot tea sent spirals of steam into the air. Finally unshackled from the alcoholic reek of the guest room, Lekif felt an aching hunger, ready to fall upon the meal.

“Such a disaster! That loathsome stench again!” A shrill cry lanced through the hall. Mistress Nasifa bore down on him, her face recoiling as if from a carcass. Clinging to her kerchief, she advanced with a paradox of gliding poise and violent speed. Her neck, a brittle reed, supported vast, bulging eyes that pinned Lekif with a predatory glare.

“Have I not told you time and again? Clean garments for this hall, and a thorough cleansing the evening before.”

“I’ve cleared the guest rooms, and I washed as well as I could,” Lekif retorted. He snatched the largest hunk of bread from the table, cramming the dry mass into his mouth and swilling it down with a heavy gulp of broth.

“I have no desire to civilize you, but spare Zaura the sight. Should she grow up in such coarseness, how do you intend to answer for it?”

Mistress Nasifa’s hand clamped onto Lekif’s wrist with bird-like ferocity, but the intervention was swift. A shadow, vast as a mountain bear, eclipsed the light. Master Huff Brand had entered the fray.

“Enough, Nasifa. Spare us the harp’in so early in the bells,” he rumbled, before turning his gaze to the boy. “Lakin. Bolt your food and look sharp. I want you ready for the arrival overhaul before the steam begins to bleed.”

“I toiled through what I could yesternight,” Lekif muttered. “All that remains is—” From behind the Master’s mountain-like silhouette, young Zaura emerged. She possessed the same unsettlingly vast eyes as her mother—twin orbs that seemed to swallow the light. Pinching her tiny nose against the reek, she tottered forward with a rhythmic waddle. “Papa! Take me outside today!”

“Zaura, yer father’s got no time for wanderin’ today.” > Huff Brand settled his immense bulk into his chair with a bone-jarring thud; the impact sent the salted fish leaping momentarily from his plate. “The fellow in the guest quarters—is he still wallowin’ in his slumber?”

“He aims to bide another night, so he says,” Lekif muttered. “Drowned in too much swill, likely,” the Master rumbled. “Long as he settles the tally for his stupor, I’ve no quarrel. The man seems to have the coin to spare, at any rate.”

“He’s not of these parts, is he?” Lekif asked. “A profligate of the Southern reaches,” the Mistress remarked, her voice thin with disdain. “Papa, will you be finished soon today?” Zaura cried, her small voice piercing the morning’s gloom.

“Stay quiet now, and keep to yer mother’s side,” Huff Brand rumbled. With effortless ease, his massive hands hoisted the girl aloft, cradling her small frame like a mountain of stone.

“It unsettles me beyond measure to harbour such an unknown essence within this spire,” Nasifa exhaled a deep, weary sigh. “I perceive shadows like a gathering tempest... a grim harbinger of an ill-omened mist.”

“Enough, Nasifa. He pays his way for every drop and crumb.” Huff Brand gave a rough snort, brandishing his fork with a hand as massive as a shovel. “If that man sows gleaming coin, I’d host the Grim Reaper himself in our finest chamber and count it a bargain.”

“I’ve never laid eyes on gold before. But that gentleman—he told me I was a most lovely young lady!” Zaura lunged at a scrap of bread with her fork, but the morsel skittered off the ceramic, coming to rest with a soft thud against the hem of her apron.

“Stars preserve us!” Nasifa let out a stifled shriek. “You must never consort with an outsider, Zaura. They are capricious beings—perhaps even ill-intentioned.” “Ill-intentioned?” Zaura tilted her head, the bread forgotten. “Does that mean he is a wicked man, Mama?”

“Psh, a pretentious peacock, no doubt,” the Master rumbled, supping his turnip broth with a coarse roar. “But to hell with the man—the boilers take precedence. We must conclude every repair before the next Great Wave strikes. Each year the ebb accelerates, and the surge that follows will only be the more savage for it.” Lekif tipped his bowl, draining the last of the scalding broth in a single, burning gulp.

“Enough dawdling! Up with you!” Huff Brand slammed a thick arm onto the table, the impact sending a startled tremor through the empty cups. “You’ve fed—now get to your stations.” “I’m on my way, Master,” Lekif replied, already moving.

He surged out of the dining hall, his boots rasping a harsh, grinding rhythm against the freezing iron of the corridor. At the passageway’s end, he lunged for a ladder so dilapidated it seemed to shiver on the brink of disintegration, ascending without a second’s doubt.