Ping'On Tower
Rising from the heart of the Palace of Bones like a bone needle threaded through the sky, Ping’On Tower is an austere, octagonal spire that looms over the waking and dreaming cities alike. This fourteen-tiered tower is open to the sky and hollow at its core, a well of shadow and silence that focuses all attention upward—to the summit, where the Nightingale Bell hangs like a captive soul.
Ping’On Tower is not just the spine of I’Cath’s dream—it is its keystone, its prison bell, and its hourglass. With every chime, time is rewritten, and the waking world yields to one woman’s vision of paradise, no matter how many must suffer to preserve it.
Architecture
Each of the tower’s fourteen levels is demarcated by a wide, flared eave carved from white stone, capped in gold and lacquered red, giving the tower the appearance of a layered pagoda. These eaves are adorned with dozens of furious golden dragons, each frozen mid-roar, their serpentine bodies coiled protectively. The dragons’ faces are grimacing, their mouths open as if forever bellowing out warnings no one can hear.
The tower’s walls bear no doors or windows until the upper levels. From the outside, it appears seamless and impenetrable save for narrow balconies that extend from every fourth level. These balconies are rarely used, and the air around them feels unnaturally still, heavy with the pressure of countless unspoken prayers and regrets.
Inside, Ping’On Tower is little more than a spiraling stair that climbs into silence. It is narrow, chill, and slick with condensation that never dries. The walls echo, but never with the speaker’s voice—only with the sounds of footsteps that seem to follow from below.
The ascent is always longer than it should be. Those who attempt to climb the tower without permission often find the stairs never end, and many vanish somewhere between the seventh and eighth floors—trapped in a private nightmare or swallowed by the Mists.
Some levels appear entirely dark or inexplicably unfamiliar, filled with shifting shadows, ink-brush characters that rewrite themselves, or statues of Tsien Chiang that watch with hollow eyes.
The topmost level, open to the wind and the stars, holds the Nightingale Bell—a massive bronze structure cast in the shape of an inverted teardrop. Etched with ancient scripts from lost dynasties and brimming with psychic tension, the bell hangs from a skeletal arch formed of interlocking, calcified spines.
At twilight each evening, Tsien Chiang climbs the tower alone, clad in white silk robes embroidered with golden cranes. She approaches the bell with ritual reverence, drawing a staff of black jade, which she uses to strike it once.
When the bell tolls:
- The air shivers.
- Dream and waking blur.
- Citizens fall into slumber, drawn into Tsien Chiang’s perfect, terrible dream of I’Cath.
- Nightmares are repelled or contained—for a time.
The sound of the bell is beautiful, melancholy, and intolerably commanding. It speaks not in tone, but in meaning: Obey. Sleep. Forget.
Tourism
- No one but Tsien Chiang dares enter the tower willingly.
- Some say the dragons on the eaves are former servants who defied the dream and were petrified mid-rebellion.
- If the bell is ever broken, the barrier between the dream and waking I’Cath would collapse—an apocalypse of beauty and suffering.
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