IC Date: 07/02/2025

The entrance to the Primordial Tower. That was the goal. Now wasn’t the time to let her mind roam entirety of this complex, as eager as it was to run rampant about the place. She had nowhere enough lights, rope, food, energy, paper, all of the above, to document this entire place in one go. Hopefully finding the tower’s entrance wouldn’t require searching the entire place, even with only the vaguest idea of where to begin. She wasn’t usually one to make decisions based on pieces of ancient artwork but if the bronze of the palace doors was any indication, the tower’s base rested directly on the bedrock. Of course, relying on something like that as a literal rendering was a less than ideal approach, but given the circumstances she didn’t have much else to go on. Besides, starting with the ground floor before chasing ghosts up the turrets was the logical choice.

Hours passed as Tempesti wandered the dark stone halls, the occasional beacon of light casting shadows across her face as she walked past, dust disturbed by the first visitor in centuries sparkling golden in the fading light cast from the world beyond the walls. The soft rise and fall of her own breath, the clicking of her boots on the ancient stone, the dust settling in a fine layer on their toes. Quiet companions in somber halls, the corridors perhaps wistful for the years in which they undoubtedly witnessed countless lives, heard songs never to be sung again. Would they welcome a newcomer, given the chance? What felt like miles of rope and chalk markings trailed behind her, their counterparts rendered in winding graphite across the page in a feat of passable amateur cartography. Given time she would no doubt execute it in a more disciplined hand, but with the sky’s eagerness to darken there was no excuse to linger on minutiae.

As the senshi rounded another dark corner, a darkened doorway loomed large before her. Every atom in her body knew this door, quivering with ancient recognition. The Primordial Tower lay beyond.

Holding a camping lantern at eye level, her upward gaze met that of a harpy cast in high relief, the ancient bronze less patinaed than that at the palace’s entrance. The creature’s outspread wings, the motion of her long hair, captured the illusion of a powerful being in flight among the natural power of the planet itself. Though flames roared frozen in metal at her feet it was clear that she was their master, not their victim, paralleled by the arcs of lightning crackling above her head. Waves crashed around the harpy’s left wing and a mountain erupted from the ground at her right. A many-pointed star crowned the scene, a delicately carved crystal set into the bronze of the door. The crystal felt…at rest…not dead but dormant, simply awaiting the return of one who could wake it.

“Harrowing Storm!”

Light and color erupted from within the carved star, casting aside the corridor’s shadow in an eager display. It seemed, almost, as though the tower sought to welcome her.