He saw it through a break in the storm, just as the fog finally broke its hold: a jagged silhouette against a sky the color of bruised fruit. The tower rose like a wound in the world, forged from obsidian so dark it drank the light.

Lightning bled through the clouds, brief white flashes illuminating shapes that slithered across the tower’s skin—limbs, tendrils, faces pressed against the stone, never still.

He had no name now. It had peeled away in the plain. But something deeper, more stubborn, drove him forward. He walked across the ground, which no longer felt real—like paper crumbling softly beneath his feet.

The Tower of the Night King loomed impossibly high. Its doors were not doors but mouths, gaping, ribbed with ivory, and wet with something that steamed. He stepped through without being swallowed, and the ascent began.

The first floor was a library of forgotten dreams. Shelves floated in the dark like bones in black water, stretching infinitely in all directions.

Books whispered to him as he passed: I was the smell of lilacs before the funeral, I was the fear of being buried alive, I was your first love’s final breath. He reached for one, and it turned to dust. The dust whispered his childhood name, the one he no longer remembered, and he moved on.

The second floor opened into a ballroom without walls. A thousand chandeliers hung from nothing. Shadows danced in endless spirals across a marble floor that bled ink. 

The dancers had no faces but moved as if they had once known joy or perhaps sorrow too deep to distinguish. A shadow reached for him and took his hand.

For a moment, he danced, his feet forgetting the ground. When he looked into its face, he saw a life he never lived: a lover, a death, a war fought in silence. Then the shadow bowed and vanished. He ascended again.

The third floor was a cathedral with no altar. Columns rose like petrified giants, and stained glass windows depicted things that had not yet happened: oceans turning to ash, children sleeping beneath moons that wept blood, a man with his face unzipping his chest to reveal a nest of eyes. Music echoed here—something that might have once been sacred, now warped and hollow.

Finally, the stairs ended. The sky lay open above him, stars smeared like oil across a torn canvas. And the Night King sat on the final platform of obsidian and silence.

He wore no crown. His robes were stitched from discarded memories. His face was Octavius’s face, but older, colder, carved in stillness.

They stood facing each other, mirrors without glass.

The Night King smiled. “What walks until it forgets where it began?”

Octavius tried to answer, but the words slipped sideways in his mind. He said, “The seeker.”

The Night King nodded. “Who dreams the dreamer?”

He hesitated. Lightning forked the sky. The crawling shapes on the tower screamed.

He answered, “The forgotten.”

The Night King stepped forward and touched Octavius’s brow. Instantly, he remembered every moment he had lost—names, dreams, pain, joy. Then, just as swiftly, it all dissolved. The memories were never his. They were borrowed, bartered, built from other lives.

The Night King whispered, “There is no throne. Only the climb.”

And Octavius—if that had ever been his name—stepped into the storm, the stars, and the end that had always been waiting at the top.

Below, the tower shifted, breathed, and waited for the next dreamer to forget themselves.

To Be Continued …