The Labyrinthine Tower

After the Little Dragon revealed himself and publicly established the Cult of the Leviathan as the ruling power of Carovingia, sweeping changes followed across the nation. Churches were desecrated or torn down, and new structures devoted to Leviathan were erected in their place. These were often towers of coiling stone, with no roof to keep out the sky - their tops gaped like open mouths, as if seeking to swallow the stars.

In the capital city of Bordeleaux, the largest of these towers was raised. Named the Labyrinthine Tower by the cultists, it was never completed, despite reaching over a thousand feet into the air. Throughout the twelve years that the Cult ruled the city openly, they continued to build the tower higher - though they claimed they were feeding it the stones and blood it needed to grow. It became a vast structure that dominated the city center, ultimately consuming both the royal palace and Carovingia's largest cathedral during its construction.

A Sinister Design

The tower is constructed from a strange black stone veined with red. Its surface is carved to resemble massive serpents or tentacles, twisted and coiled around each other as they rise skyward. Between these writhing columns are gaps wide enough for a person to pass through, but there are no doors - nothing to suggest a designed entrance. Within the gaps, the shadows are deep and impenetrable, even under bright sunlight. A torch offers only meager illumination: just enough to see your own feet, and little more.

Cultists captured after the war have said little about the tower's purpose or meaning. Few even admitted to having entered it themselves, though many confessed to delivering prisoners to those who "tended" it. This has given rise to countless theories about the tower's ultimate function. Most believe it was intended as the focal point of a worldwide ritual - one that would tear open the skin of the world and allow Leviathan to enter from Beyond.

A Twisted Space

Those who explored the tower found its interior to be a maze of corridors, seemingly far larger than the structure's exterior should allow. While most of the smaller Leviathan towers were hollow shells with walls a foot or so thick, the Labyrinthine Tower's interior bears little relationship to its visible form. The corridors are not proper passageways but the gaps between massive stone coils, with uneven floors and contorted walls. Progress is difficult: the paths narrow unpredictably, bottleneck or end abruptly, and some scouts reported that the coils themselves were subtly shifting - making already narrow spaces even tighter.

More disturbingly, the tower's interior is not bound entirely to three spatial dimensions. In certain places, space bends away from the mundane, warping objects and creatures that pass too close. Flexible materials may twist unnaturally, parts of them vanishing into invisible folds of higher-dimensional space. Rigid items - such as staves, blades, or bones - usually snap when drawn into these distortions. These twisted spaces are not fixed. They drift slowly through the tower, following inscrutable paths, moving in and out of the stone. They remain undetectable until they interact with something anchored in normal space - and by then, it is often too late.

Incomplete, but not Destroyed

When the Living Gods of Lemuria called down a stone from the sky to smite the city of Bordeleaux, their intent was clear: nothing within the city was to survive. And indeed, where once stood a proud capital is now a vast crater - save for the Labyrinthine Tower, which still rises, unscathed, at its center. The meteor's impact revealed what had been hidden before: the tower's foundations run deep beneath the earth, its columns spreading like malignant stone roots beneath the city.

When the armies of the Alliance reached the ruins, they attempted to destroy the tower anew - but nothing they tried had any effect. Ultimately, they chose to withdraw, and established a strict cordon around the crater. No civilians are permitted anywhere near the site - far enough, even, that the tower cannot be seen from the perimeter.

In the fifteen years since the war’s end, the Army of Albion has maintained constant surveillance of the tower. Thus far, it has neither grown nor diminished. Several cultists have been caught attempting to return to the site, but each poisoned themselves before they could be questioned.

Most of the world remains unaware that the tower survived. The governments of both the Empire and the Mu Confederation have agreed to keep it that way. Rumors of the Little Dragon's survival are already widespread - admitting that the Labyrinthine Tower still stands would provoke panic on a scale they cannot afford.