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The Tower of Shadow
The hard dark stone of this place allows sound ready movement and even now the sounds of Larry’s frantic struggling with the zombie, Grey, are carried swiftly throughout the corridors of the tower. With the silent flight of Echo from the scene of struggle, all else is silent – save for the young man’s reckless battle against a foe he cannot possibly harm. Even as Larry grunts in pain as the zombie’s thrashing hands wound him slightly, another sound rises upward from the lower levels of the tower, a sound of vigorous blows striking in a rhythmic pattern, a sound as of drums.
There is a stern discipline about the sound, a precision to its rhythm. Such a sound seeks not to conceal itself, but to announce its presence as a presence that must be taken with the utmost of seriousness. The young man wrestles the dead man and in his desperation does not hear – but the sound is present all the same, present and growing stronger. There is something chilling about this drumming, something that has room neither for mercy nor compassion, something that knows only grim and unrelenting purpose. Something dwarven, and yet darker, more somber and fatalistic, than even the most ancient and bleak of dwarven songs of heroes tragically fallen and hopeless battles defiantly fought.
Without pause the drumming swells to fill the corridors of the tower with the pressure of its sound. A voice then rises, confident and strong, above the drumming, a voice that in a matter of but a few notes becomes a chorus of voices all singing in precise time with one another. That the voices are many is clear, but their number cannot be discerned through the unified precision of the singing. For one is the song that accompanies the one beating of the many the drums. One is the vigor of the many voices. And as one many mailed fists swing heavy weapons in time to its cadences and many heavy boots ascend into the tower from the lightless warrens beneath.
They do not pause to ask direction or permission, they simply arrive. They speak to no one. They answer to no one. They are not those trusted with the defense of this place, but defend it they shall, showing neither pity nor understanding – only purpose. They are the sons of the sons of Shadow, the children of mighty Terrakis, the child of the Mage, and none shall deny them their place within these walls. Many they and as one they arrive, for one is the purpose and one is the singing and one is the song – the song of their slavery and the song of their freedom, the song beneath whose singing is the enduring of hardship and the thrusting aside of opposition:
And it’s go, boys, go!
They’ll time your every breath.
And every day you’re in this place
you’re two days nearer death.
But you goooooooooooo! *
And the song thrusts aside all lesser sounds as it fills the stairwells, the hallways, the chambers, of the lower tower.
* From The Chemical Worker's Song by Great Big Sea
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