After the Fall

5: “Corrupted Basis”

5.1: “Euclidean Expectation”

Shaun beckons the party into his office and locks the door behind them. The room is in utter disarray. Godric and Marvello explain Mikhael Mantovani’s secret identity, and that they solved the blackmailing problem, hopefully averting war. Shaun is confused, and tells them he thought they were trying to save Hana from the Tower. He explains that when he got back from Kolle the guards informed him that she hadn’t emerged from the Tower in a week, and nobody they had sent in had emerged. He says he entered the Tower himself but didn’t find anyone before being led back around to the exit.

Marvello shows Shaun the decrypted letter he received from Hana, and Shaun says he doesn’t understand how the letter got out of the Tower without anyone noticing. They ask what his mission was and what he found, but he says he can’t tell them without Hana’s permission.

Shaun says, “You understand, right? You do know what my job is?”

“No,” says Marvello.

“That’s… fair.”

The party discuss payment for going into the Tower, and various theories on what’s going on, and what happened to the missing guards. Godric gets Shaun to agree to give him a suit of plate mail if they can get Hana back. They find a nearby cat to send into the Tower before them which they name Leo. Mati uses animal messenger to send the cat to deliver Hana a message:

“Hana Kohl, this is Mati. Your Shaun is worried for you. If you get this message write a response on the collar of this cat and it shall return to me. If you are dead, please do not eat this cat.”

The cat runs into the Tower and disappears before reappearing moments later, confused. They catch it and use speak with animals to ask it what happened inside the Tower. It says it was trapped inside the Tower for some time and saw around five strange people that it didn’t know before finding its way back out.

“Meow? Let me go? Please? Are you going to eat me?”

“I am not going to eat you, come now. Who do you think feeds you the scraps at the Rusty Duckling?”

“I like scraps.”

“I can give you more scraps. Now, I ask you a question.” She holds up some scraps. “How long were you in the tower for?”

The cat stares. “Scraps!”

She hides them behind her back.

Mati sends the cat back into the Tower with orders to approach the first person it sees with a message: “This is Shaun the assistant to the Tower Lord. Identify yourselves and your mission and tell us where the Tower Lord Hana Kohl might be found. Please write your message on this collar.” The party waits in Shaun’s office for 24 hours but the cat does not return. The party decides to enter the Tower all at once and look around. Marvello hands Shaun his egg bag, asking him to look after Mittens.

“This is Mittens. Look after him. He likes eggs.”

“Okay, Marvello.” He opens the bag. “Oh fuck!” He closes it. “Mittens is… quite lovely.” He puts it on the desk. “I’ll take very good care of… it.”

We walk across the courtyard, and hear from the open window of Shaun’s office: “Uhhh… Wendy! Can you bring… an egg? Maybe two?”

Maximus blindfolds himself and enters the Tower, followed by the others. In the centre of the teleportation room is a 40ft long trail of dried blood ending at the broken body of a dead cat. Godric deduces the cat was killed with magic. Marvello recommends Maximus take his blindfold off. Looking around the room, Mati notices a passage leading up out through the ceiling that wasn’t there last time — carved out of the solid rock in the same manner as the rest of the Tower.

Map of the atrium of the Fourth Tower.

Standing in the centre of the room is an Astral Servant: a rolling mass of black smoke, constrained into a humanoid shape by an invisible force. It has no face or features besides a strawberry-sized ball, glowing deep orange, floating in the centre of its chest. It whirls around to face the party, then, after a moment of still silence, rushes towards them before stopping dead. As it moves it emits an awful sound, like tearing metal, that unsettles the party. Maximus casts warding wind, which deafens everyone. The party surround the Servant at close range and attack. It lunges a limb straight through Maximus’s stomach, and he falls unconscious. The wind dissipates and the air is filled with the sound of twenty or thirty voices speaking, too far away to make out, all coming from the creature. Marvello stabs the creature once more and its form falls apart, glowing heart hovering for a second before hitting the ground with a clang. He identifies it as a red-hot, glowing teapot.

The party takes a moment to recover, healing Maximus and searching the room. Godric watches the skylight as an ornate vase drops from it. He tries to catch it but it shatters into pieces on the floor. Mati goes over to the cooling teapot and tries to smash it with a club. Her first strike cracks it, and it produces a flash of unearthly light and an audible cry of pain. Marvello grabs it to keep it away from her, finding it unexpectedly cold to the touch. He wraps it in his cloak, and a patch of liquid seeps out from it. He tastes the liquid, identifying it as a cheap energy drink. Mati growls at the teapot.

“Thank fuck it’s not piss.”

— Marvello, on Carabao.

Godric casts identify on the teapot and discovers a little about it: it used to be the soul of a woman named Julia, and currently is a teapot which produces different drinks depending on how the creature holding it feels, slightly muted by the damage it sustained. Marvello tries in vain to fit the vase fragments back together, and finds the floor where it impacted is slightly cracked. Godric identifies the vase and finds nothing.

The party goes up the stairs and waits by the door to Hana’s office. Marvello sneaks ahead and finds the room exactly as he remembers, but hears distant voices coming from behind the painting. He returns to the others and they decide to send Maximus back outside for help. Mati walks him back to the entrance but they find the door has disappeared. Mati screams a string of curses at the shaft in the ceiling, then the two return to Hana’s office. The party decides to rest in the corridor, with Mati standing guard.

Map of Hana’s office and adjoining corridor.

Only twenty minutes into their rest, Mati hears voices on the other side of the door and decides to go in alone to fight them. She wakes Godric up and tells him to protect the others. They hear the crash of a painting hitting the ground from the room. Mati opens the door and finds the painting on the floor, and a tunnel carved into the wall behind it. Standing in the tunnel, whispering in fifty voices, stand two motionless Astral Servants.

5.2: “Theories on Metaphysics”

Mati notices the Servant further into the tunnel is missing an arm. She conjures eight hyenas and wild-shapes. Aither bursts in to help her fight. One of the Servants wails, and five of the hyenas immediately fall unconscious. The other party members rush into the room and attack, and Maximus casts warding wind to protect them from the creatures’ screams. Mati wakes one of the hyenas up.

The two-armed Servant rushes up to Maximus and stabs an arm through his chest. The wind stops as he instantly dies from catastrophic damage.

“My real… name… *cough* is Bellin… Edevane… Culpepper… *cough* Archambeau. Will you… tell my family… *cough* I was brave?”

— Maximus’s first last words.

The Servants’ screams disable more and more party members until eventually Godric is the only one left standing. He punches the two-armed Servant and it bursts, glowing heart falling to the floor. As the smoke clears, he sees it’s a pair of glasses. He wakes up a hyena, which wakes up all the other hyenas in a chain, ending with Mati. The hyenas wake up the rest of the party, who dispatch the one-armed Servant. Its heart falls to the ground — a red-hot crossbow.

Aither inspects the crossbow. It’s made of a heavy black metal, the same material as the Star frame. Pierced diagonally through the frame is a bolt of faintly translucent black-purple material, rendering the crossbow unusable. Marvello takes the glasses. The lenses are hexagonal, and slightly rose-tinted. Identification reveals they are called Harriet, used to be a librarian, and allow the wearer to read all writing.

Mati and Aither attempt to heal Maximus but discover he is dead. Aither’s aasimar healing leaves a metallic taste hanging in the air. She kicks Maximus’s body, then lifts up one of his hands and tries to slap Godric with it. Mati snaps at her, angry, and drapes Maximus’s body over her back to protect it.

The party head through the tunnel and find themselves in a half-destroyed library. Mati rests, protecting Maximus’s body. Aither looks for books written in Celestial but fails to find any.

Map of the library and kitchen in the Fourth Tower.

Marvello finds a book, “Allett’s Tome of Demonology”, that describes demons and various methods of combatting them. It makes no mention of modern magic, instead discussing a kind of ritual magic using a multitude of ingredients and symbols and incantations. He finds reference to the Dance — a sort of ritual which can keep a demon bound for some time.

Marvello feels a book on one of the tables is important — a small, battered book, titled: “Theories on Metaphysics, Compiled from the Notes of the Late Dr. Allen”. The foreword explains that the titular Dr. Allen was a respected figure in the field of metaphysics, who became withdrawn from his colleagues and friends weeks before his death, obsessed with a new theory. They decided to publish what he was working on in the final days of his life in memory of him. He wrote that he had discovered that the world was a hallucination being had by a higher-dimensional being. He theorised that the physical forms of lilim were just shadows cast by their transcendent minds, and that a spell existed that could draw out a “more real” version of their true self.

Godric looks for books written in Ancient. He finds a number talking about a kind of Ancient magic, which he doesn’t really understand. It was based entirely on spoken mathematical commands and required a huge amount of calculation on the part of the user. He finds references to Project Athena, dated the year 2072, but no clear description of what it is.

The hyenas scout ahead, but none return. Marvello listens at the door to the next room, and hears the sound of more Astral Servants. Mati casts warding wind, wild-shapes, and breaks down the door into the next room: a professional kitchen. They all run in and attack the nearest Servant, this one headless. It stabs Mati with its arm; she reverts to goblin form, and the wind stops. Marvello shoots the headless Servant, dissipating its form. Its heart hits the ground, the hilt of a knife.

“SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

— Headless, on life.

The party all attack the other Servant, and Mati tears its heart out with her teeth — a red-hot chef’s knife. She drops it to the ground, and Marvello picks both Remnants up. The handles on both knives are the same style, made of the same black metal as the crossbow. The blade of the chef’s knife is a purple-black glass. Godric tests the knife out and finds it seems incredibly sharp when cutting ingredients but is totally blunt against living things or objects. Identify reveals it used to be a kind chef named Harvey.

Off from the library is a strange living room complete with sofa, fireplace, and a zebra-print rug. Past about halfway down the room the entire room and its contents stretch out to twice their normal length. Paintings on the wall, including one of the previous Queen and her wife, and the Tower Lord Darius’s father, are comically wide. At the end of the room the floor curves down into a rectangular pit. Marvello peers down and sees, three hundred feet below, the atrium they were in earlier — with bits of shattered vase on the floor.

Map of the mineshaft in the Fourth Tower.

Exploring the other corridor they reach a large, circular room. A trail of blood leads from the centre of the room down into a large, square chasm. The room seems very similar to the atrium, and Mati says she can smell the scent of the party in the room. At the bottom of the hole they can see a small door which they decide to investigate. Marvello and Godric climb down using their climbing equipment, and can hear the clanging of distant machinery. Exploring through the doorway, they find mining equipment and a small mineshaft, cut incredibly cleanly into the solid rock. At the end of the mineshaft is a stairway leading up towards the source of the sound.

5.3: “Dead or Alive”

While resting in the mineshaft, Mati sends a magical bird out of the Tower to ask the guild for help. Hours later, they hear the tapping of feet on stone as Talon and Salazar arrive. They’ve brought diamonds from the guild, which Mati uses to cast revivify on Maximus.

Maximus finds himself awake, lying on the First Axiom — a flat, cold plane of white marble, covered in pinpoints of black, that extends as far as he can see in all directions. Above him is the Starless Sky — black void dotted with pinpoints of light. Hundreds of lilim surround him, each standing motionless, eyes closed, hovering about a foot off the floor. He approaches one, a young woman. She is not breathing, her skin is cold, and she does not react at all to him.

Maximus sees a cloud of black smoke floating around from person to person in the distance. It stops at each one, seemingly inspecting them. Maximus approaches it and it twists around to face him before surging in his direction. He speaks to it using message and it seems confused by his presence. He casts warding wind to prevent it from reaching him, and keeps talking to it.

“What are you?”

“I am the End.”

A few hundred metres away, one of the Dreamers opens their eyes. The smoke monster reacts instantly, rushing towards them and engulfing them. They scream briefly. Maximus asks the creature what it’s doing, and it replies: “feeding”.

One of the tiny black dots on the ground near Maximus starts glowing a brilliant white, and he understands he is being called back to life. He wakes up back in the mineshaft with the others, nostrils filled with the stench of ozone.

Maximus opens his eyes and looks around. “Is this the real one?”

“The real what?” Godric asks.

“The real everything.”

“Yes?”

Marvello says: “debatable.”

Returning from the dead, Maximus left a memory behind: his mother starting to teach him his most important instrument, the hand-pan drums.

The party rest, discuss the events up until this point, prepare for a fight, and continue up the stairs. At the top of the stairs is a corridor leading to the door to the lab. Mati investigates the door: the corridor smells of salt, and the metal embedded in the door tastes of blood. They open the door, which leads into the same laboratory they saw before. Marvello goes up to the cylinder of golden liquid in the centre of the room and inspects it thoroughly. He comes to the understanding that the cylinder contains a removed humanoid nervous system, but cannot perceive it directly.

Map of Ellie’s lab.

The staticy voice from the console greets them as before, and Maximus speaks to it. The voice identifies itself as Ellie, and tells Maximus that her sister, Eris, is using too much power from the Tower, causing the Euclidean anomalies they’ve been experiencing. She says Hana is with her sister, and she can open a passage to them through the engine rooms. She says she’s been able to see them as they moved through the Tower, and can see two Servants and one lilim in the engine rooms.

“Is there a way to stop the servants?”

“I can destroy them… if I have enough power.”

“Can we destroy them?”

“You’ve done okay so far!”

“I died.”

“You destroyed some of them…”

“I died!”

“…It didn’t stick.”

Ellie opens a passage through one of the walls and the party goes through into a room full of crates filled with chips of rock. Lockers on one wall contain a total of four black diving suits with glass helmets, which some of the party take. In the next room is a pile of finely pulverised coal and a couple of shovels.

Map of the engine rooms of the Fourth Tower.

Around a corner at the end of the room is a ten-foot drop down into another room, containing a running stream of glowing orange liquid. In the room are two Servants, pulling a humanoid woman towards the stream. Maximus notices the woman’s clothing is an old-fashioned servants’ outfit. He messages her to ask what’s going on, and she shouts out loud for help. Godric jumps down to help but can’t stop the Servants before they push her in. She screams and dissolves into a glowing golden liquid which begins to flow downstream.

“The woman is now goop.”

— Godric, on metaphysical transmutation.

Godric sprints away from the Servants down the stream and pulls a lever, diverting the flow into a crucible set into the floor. The rest of the party fight the Servants until he returns and punches one with a shockwave, destroying it and launching its heart into the liquid, where it dissolves. The other Servant screams, causing Maximus and Godric to fall unconscious, then spears Godric through the chest with its arm, killing him.

“STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error} My initial session process or system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of (0xc0000034) (0x00000000 0x0000000). The system has been shut down."

— Godric, on death.

Mati uses thunderwave to push the remaining Servant towards the stream, but it hovers above it. Her summoned hyenas jump onto it and push it down, its form instantly breaking as it touches the liquid. Its Remnant falls into the stream and dissolves, along with the hyenas.

Mati runs over to Godric and tries to heal him, discovering he is dead. She checks in her bag but does not have enough diamonds left for revivify, nor enough spell slots. In the meantime, the dissolved Servant and hyenas flow downstream and out of the room through a channel in the wall, giving Ellie enough power to revive Godric: the trails of black in the walls closest to his body glow white, light trailing from them and across the floor, bringing him back and lifting him to stand.

Godric wakes up under the Starless Sky, and looks around. He tries to wake one of the Dreamers with a shake, then a hard slap. The man suddenly opens his eyes, falling to his knees and clutching his chest. Godric interrogates the man, learning quickly that he was living in Kolle with his family when he suddenly had a heart attack and woke up here.

“I went to church every week. I guess I thought it would be nice?”

— The Man Godric Hit So Hard He Woke Up From Real Life, on the afterlife.

Godric sees a smoke creature some distance behind the man coming towards them, and senses behind him the power of resurrection magic calling to him. He tells the man not to worry, then steps back. Coming back, Godric leaves behind his knowledge of crafting firearms.

“What’s that?”

“It’s nothing. Farewell, my friend.”

“Okay, metal man. I trust y—”

Marvello investigates the room, finding a variety of tools and equipment for forging, and chains fixed to the wall that had clearly been used to hold prisoners. Maximus goes to the end of the room where it connects to the laboratory they are looking for, and scans the room. It’s littered with equipment, tools, and pages of written notes. In the centre of the room is a scaled-up version of the amber tube from the first laboratory.

The party rests, and Maximus receives a message from Mikhael through his Sending Stone:

“Maximus, everything is going wrong.
My father has disappeared but
nobody will tell me what’s
going on. I think Mercy
Kamau is coming. My mother—”

5.4: “Ancient and Unblinking”

The glowing liquid from the dissolved woman in the crucible solidifies over time into a small object at the bottom of the bowl. Marvello picks it out — a tiny locket with a silver chain, containing a small picture of a woman, man, and baby, all smiling. Identify reveals the locket is named Natasha, and allows its holder to cast hallow.

Maximus and Godric discuss what they each experienced while dead.

Studying the laboratory, Godric deduces the equipment in the room is of two types: one of the same origin as the tube and consoles, build into the substance of the room, and equipment brought in to study the former.

On the other side of the room from him is Hana Kohl, and in the centre of the room, interacting with the consoles, is Eris. She is 20ft tall and has four white, feathered wings. Her shape is humanoid but disproportionately thin, with very long arms and legs. From the top of her head grow two long, twisted white horns. Her eyes are completely black. Besides the wings, she matches physical descriptions of the Ancients.

The party climb down into the room, and Eris comes over to them, closing the opening behind them with a motion of her hand. Mati steps forward in front of the others. Eris expresses happiness that more fuel has arrived. Hana runs up behind her, telling her that the party are her friends. Maximus says they can be useful in other ways, and Marvello offers to go out of the Tower and bring back more people to use as fuel. Mati and Marvello stare into the tube and discover it contains another nervous system, without wings.

“My purpose? MY purpose? A child of the Dark Mother asks MY purpose?”

— Eris, on answering straightforward questions.

Eris appears to nearly accept the party’s offers, but changes her mind and attacks the party after encasing Hana in stone. Talon appeals to her to stop fighting but she refuses. Godric and Maximus are trapped in a stone sphere she summons from the floor, and the others spread out. Talon pulls out the locket, and casts hallow, pushing Eris and the summoned hyenas outside its radius. Marvello breaks Godric out of the stone as Eris vapourises a hyena with a beam of light from her eyes. She summons another sphere of stone to encase Talon, which frees Hana. Hana waves a hand, causing the stone encasing Maximus to recede. Marvello realises the bag he was carrying Salazar in was pulled outside the hallowed circle. Godric hits Eris with magic darts that pierce through her wings, tearing the feathers off and revealing solid light below.

“Eris, stop now — or I’m going to have to… fight you, I guess?”

— Hana Kohl, on loyalty.

Eris lands on the ground and communes with her deity, asking three questions:

“Absolute, answer my call! Am I just in my pursuits?” She pauses. “Is it your will that I fight these creatures?” She looks up and unfurls her wings. “Very well, I shall carry out your will.” She looks up and stands a little straighter. The light is a little stronger. “And, will I prevail?”

5.5: “A Matter of Time”

Talon shouts at Hana to help them in the fight, and she conjures a wall of stone with a motion of her hand. She climbs up on it and directs bands of marble from the floor to restrain the angel.

Salazar closes the gap on Eris with a burst of magic, cat form sublimating into black mist. It coalesces near her in the form of a crouching humanoid, unclothed but covered in black fur, unmistakeably feline with a cat tail and pointed ears. He jumps, and cuts into her wings with supernaturally sharp claws. Eris throws Salazar back, her midnight nails cutting through the air and his flesh with equal ease. She shouts to Hana that the presence of a lamia should prove the party is evil. Hana replies that she trusts them, and knows they’re good people. Eris rises up from the ground, summoning a barrier around herself, and disintegrates another hyena.

Maximus runs over to Salazar and heals him, noticing burning fingernail marks down his arms. Godric asks Hana to help him reach Eris, and she summons a pillar of stone under him to raise him up. He summons three mirror images of himself.

“Well, you know what they say… Many hands make light work.”

— Godric, on the illusion of help.

Eris’s barrier falls, and she conjures and throws a radiant javelin at the party, but the hallowed area protects them. Maximus and Aither attack, tearing more feathers from her wings, exposing thick tendrils of golden light beneath. She can no longer fly, so Hana tries to restrain her again — but she kicks the grasping stone away. Salazar jumps at Eris again, and she stabs him through the chest with one of her radiant wing-tendrils. He is forced back into cat form, and is thrown back away from her. Talon is filled with holy rage, and attacks.

“Take thisss, you she-devil — and return to whence you came! Surrender to our combined strength, and we will show mercy. Continue to fight, and we will… protect the world from your evil!”

— Talon, on holy rage.

His javelin connects with her, launching her back and off her feet. The hyenas, Marvello, and Godric attack her, and Hana restrains her with bands of marble from the floor. Aither takes Eris’s hand, expecting celestial warmth — but feels a cold, dreadful power that she has not felt before.

Marvello asks Eris about the tube, who confirms that the thing he saw in the tube was her body.

Marvello asks Eris, “How is that you in the tube?”

She looks at Marvello, then looks at the tube. “Oh. I didn’t expect your kind to be so perceptive. Yes, little one, in a sense.”

“How?”

“Urgh. The details would take me too long to say.”

Hana says, “What are you talking about? Time doesn’t pass here. You could explain if you wanted to.”

“I don’t like talking about it! You know I don’t like talking about it!”

Talon asks if the tube in the other lab contains another of her kind, and she admits, with disdain, that it does. Hana tells him that it’s Eris’s sister.

“She’s no sister of mine! I wish she didn’t exist.”

— Eris, on family.

Seemingly at her reaction, Hana laughs. Maximus interrogates Hana about the people they killed, and she responds that she didn’t enjoy it, but it was necessary. Eris says the people were lilim who entered the Tower some time in the past, and explains that the Servants were once mortals before being given a greater purpose.

“I am a servant, an instrument, a tool, of my god: the Absolute.”

Talon asks about her god, and she explains: she worships the Absolute, a deity dedicated to wiping out the Dark Mother Lilith, and all her children. She says the Absolute aims to bring the universe to a pure, sinless state, without deception — which cannot happen while lilim exist. Marvello suggests travelling forward in time to a point that lilim no longer exist.

Eris tells Marvello she doesn’t know what’s draining the power. He asks about Eris’s past; she tells him she hasn’t been to the real world, or to any of the other Towers. She tells him that she was born “in this very room”, and that her first memory is of a now-dead dear friend. Marvello notices her glance at Maximus.

“Imagine a room. A comfortable room, with a fireplace. It is, at one time, cold; wood stacked ready for winter. At another time, a roaring flame in the fireplace: hot, and light, and comfortable. Another point in time, it is cold again; ashes. Here, they are not separated by time, but by space. They all exist together, and you can walk between them.”

— Eris, on time.

Interrogated by Talon, Hana explains she’s been learning magic, and feels she’s making progress on understanding something that will be important.

“It’s not magic!”

— Eris, on magic.

Hana gestures to the equipment set up in the room, and tells Talon that they’ve been studying the people studying the lab. Talon asks what happened to the people, and she gives her theory that they became something else. Eris disagrees, saying if that were the case, they would still be in the room.

Marvello stares into the tube, then at one of Eris’s feathers, and comes to the realisation that nothing is real. He tries to experience time from a different perspective, but instead finds himself filled with the all-consuming urge to flee. He starts climbing up the tube in the centre of the room to try and get above it. Godric asks Eris to fly up and catch him, but she says she can’t fly with her wings damaged. Hana uses magic to let Godric fly up and bring Marvello down safely.

Talon asks Hana if she shares Eris’s goal, and she says she does not. She says Eris won’t listen to reason, and just keeps talking about saving her. Marvello asks Eris where and what souls are; she says children of Lilith have no souls. Godric starts describing the Starless Sky, but Maximus stops him from explaining any more.

“I speak with it, and it speaks back. Just like any god.”

— Eris, on faith.

Maximus asks Hana how staying in the Tower helps address any of the problems in the real world. She says being better at magic would help, but agrees that she should return with them, and thanks them for coming. Eris objects, but they clearly both already knew it was time for her to go. She asks Hana to promise that she’ll come back in the future, to help her once their problems in the real world are fixed. She says she can’t promise that.

Marvello senses a door leading to an exit with his new power. Eris and Hana look a little confused that he worked out the right direction to go.

Talon and Godric search the tables in the room. Talon looks for religious symbols but doesn’t find anything he recognises. Talon notices the script the notes are written in looks similar to Common, and Godric recognises it does not match any ancestor of modern scripts. Talon takes a ballpoint pen, and one of Eris’s feathers.

Godric asks Eris about the existence of a being beneath the earth, and shows her his Thomas the Tank Engine lunchbox lid. She recognises it, and tells him it is just a toy. He summons mystical coal smoke, and Eris flinches, shouting to Hana that he is a dangerous servant of the Dark Mother. Godric runs away, and Hana opens a doorway in the wall for them to leave through.

On the way out of the Tower, Godric asks Hana about the runes he found on the plant pot in her office. She explains they were designed to allow time to pass inside the pot so the plant could grow, but they work very inconsistently. Talon asks about the diving suits, and she confirms they make the wearer undetectable to Servants. At the end of a short corridor through the marble they find themselves in the Tower atrium again. This time there is no blood on the floor, and the door leading out is still present. Marvello hears a cat meow from behind the stairs, and he picks it up to take back with them.

Everyone folds out of the Tower together, finding it to be the middle of the night back in Maelor. Talon still has his ballpoint pen, but Eris’s feather disappeared as he crossed the boundary. The light in Shaun’s office is on, and he opens the window and jumps out to the ground, running towards the party. He pulls Hana into a tight embrace as her legs give out and she falls to the floor. She says she feels a lot weaker in the real world, and hasn’t slept in months. Shaun thanks everyone for saving her, and takes her away to rest.