The Hidden Ground

He had reached the tower grounds at dusk and circled them in the deepening red-brown until the paths vanished into shadow and his side threatened to fold him in half. With no way in and nowhere safer to go, he spent the night on a nearby bench under a broad-leaf tree, waking by turns to the hidden thrum under the soil and the ache in his shoulder. By first light, Elias had already crossed the wet grass twice.

The tower loomed ahead, broad and dark against the soft gold of the morning dome. Everything else in this place seemed made to welcome hands, feet, idle bodies, drifting attention. Arches opened before anyone reached them. Paths curved toward shade and water. Benches grew out of the ground where people might want to stop. This thing did none of that. It rose plain and sealed from a ring of trimmed growth, its skin a dull black-gray that drank the light instead of giving it back.

Elias moved slowly around the base with one hand pressed now and then to his sore side, forcing himself not to hurry just because the answer had to be here. A thin whine still rang in his left ear from the crash, and every time he bent too fast, the world tilted for a moment before it steadied. He ignored it. He crouched where the wall met the ground, brushed aside low leaves, found hairline seams too straight to be natural, then stood and traced them with his fingertips. The surface felt cool at first touch, then faintly warmer in strips, as if power still slept behind it.